Copyright
by
Jonathan Paul Lamb
2011
The Dissertation Committee for Jonathan Paul Lamb Certifies that this is the
approved version of the following dissertation:
Shakespeare’s Writing Practice:
‘Literary’ Shakespeare and the Work of Form
Committee:
Douglas Bruster, Co-Supervisor
Wayne A. Rebhorn, Co-Supervisor
Mary Blockley
John Rumrich
Elizabeth Scala
Shakespeare’s Writing Practice:
‘Literary’ Shakespeare and the Work of Form
by
Jonathan Paul Lamb, B.A., M.A.
Dissertation
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of
The University of Texas at Austin
in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements
for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
The University of Texas at Austin
May 2011
Dedication
For April, of course.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the American Council of Learned Societies for the Dissertation
Completion Fellowship that allowed me to finish this project. I am also grateful to the
University of Texas, which has provided me with great financial and institutional support,
even in a time of recession and budget cuts. A Mike Hogg Endowment Fellowship
provided time to complete the dissertation, and two Professional Development Awards
allowed me to share parts of the project at national conferences. The Departments of
English and of Rhetoric and Writing provided teaching support throughout my tenure as a
UT graduate student, and the Crow Scholarship in Geoffrey Chaucer Studies provided
much-needed travel support. I also want to thank the various staffs of the Harry Ransom
Humanities Research Center and the Department of English, especially Patricia Schaub
and Amy Stewart.
Many friends from outside the University of Texas have made this project better
with their encouragement, helpful comments and conversation, and challenging
questions. Lukas Erne and Patrick Cheney organized a Shakespeare Association of
America seminar on “Shakespeare and Early Modern Textual Culture.” Although they
may not have known it, this seminar was a foundational moment in my dissertation and
my career. Conversations and correspondence with David Bergeron, Vernon Dickson,
Don Hedrick, Eric Johnson-DeBaufre, Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich, and Joseph Navitsky
have shaped the project in various ways. I am especially grateful to Adam Hooks and Jim
Marino for their friendship and advice, and for helping me understand Shakespeare’s
complex relationship with owning and selling words.
My friends and colleagues at the University of Texas have been a constant source
of every kind of help, and I am deeply thankful to them all. Elizabeth Cullingford and
v
Wayne Lesser have expertly overseen my studies as department chair and graduate
advisor, respectively. Like every UT graduate student, I have been surrounded by a
crowd of superb teachers and models: Janine Barchas, J. K. Barrett, Dan Birkholz, the
late Kate Frost, James Loehlin, Eric Mallin, Frank Whigham, Hannah Wojciehowski, and
Jorie Woods. I have benefitted too from a crowd of peers, each of whom has also been a
teacher and model: Meghan Andrews, Chris Bradley, Matt Davies, Lydia French, Brooke
Hunter, Jason Leubner, Arlen Nydam, Tim Turner, Alberto Varon, and Caroline
Wigginton. Special thanks go to four of these colleagues: from my first day in graduate
school until the present moment, Vimala Pasupathi and Doug Eskew have been my
mentors and friends. If I have the right to call myself a successful graduate student and
academic, it is due to their constant advice and help. Finally, to my friends Greg Foran
and Joey Taylor, I owe an always-increasing debt of thanks. Besides having passed
countless hours of conversation and having eaten innumerable enchilada plates, they have
read every word of this dissertation and many more besides. They are two of the best
friends I will ever have.
My dissertation committee comprises five outstanding people. Mary Blockley,
who claims Anglo-Saxon writing as her field of specialization, nevertheless knows more
about Shakespeare’s language than I could ever hope to know. Her enthusiasm for the
project has never waivered, even in those moments when mine was almost lost. Her
dedication to solid scholarship (and good conference paper handouts) motivates and
informs my every piece of writing. John Rumrich is the reason I came to UT. He is
gracious, patient, and hilarious. His clear thinking and writing has refined my own, and
he has taught me how to think rigorously about the conversations of literary criticism.
Elizabeth Scala has shaped my professional life since my first day of graduate school,
when I sat in her seminar on Chaucer. “The key to this course,” she said, “is to disagree,
vi
because it’s going to get boring if we all just sit around nodding our heads at each other.”
Even then I saw that this statement applies to all of graduate school and beyond. Liz’s
willingness to challenge assertions, ask incisive questions, provide rigorous feedback,
offer bracing, realistic words of encouragement, and give every imaginable kind of
professional advice has made her a superb mentor and friend. Wayne Rebhorn has guided
me through graduate school with incomparable expertise and wisdom. Every sentence of
this dissertation is better because Wayne, one of the best academic writers I know,
marked it up. His uncanny knack for offering encouragement and skepticism at precisely
the right moment has rescued me time and again from feeling complacent or (more
frequently) from quitting altogether. Douglas Bruster oversaw the project from start to
finish with every form of support. I think he has known all along what it would become,
and he has steadily, patiently helped it get there. There is no area of my professional life
that does not show Doug’s influence, and always for the better. I am infinitely grateful to
have him as a mentor and friend.
Finally, I thank my parents, my brother, and the many friends who haven’t read a
word of this dissertation but who, through their longstanding support and love, have
made it possible. Thanks especially to Josh Murphy and Blake Magee. Last of all, I thank
my stunning wife April, whose tenderness and strength and beauty have shaped every
aspect of my life. I cannot imagine who I would be without you, nor do I want to. I love
you.
vii
Shakespeare’s Writing Practice:
‘Literary’ Shakespeare and the Work of Form
Jonathan Paul Lamb, Ph.D.
The University of Texas at Austin, 2011
Supervisor: Douglas Bruster and Wayne A. Rebhorn
In its introduction and four chapters, this project demonstrates that Shakespeare
responded to—and powerfully shaped—the early modern English literary marketplace.
Against the longstanding critical limitation of the category “Literature” that restricts it to
the printed book, this dissertation argues that the literary is not so much a quality of texts
as a mode of exchange encompassing not merely printed books but many other forms of
representation. Whether writing for the stage, the page, or both, Shakespeare borrowed
from and influenced other writers, and it is these specifically formal transactions that
make his works literary. Thus, we can understand Shakespeare’s literariness only by
scrutinizing the formal features of his works and showing how they circulated in an
economy of imaginative writing. Shakespeare self-consciously refashioned words, styles,
metrical forms, and figures of speech even as he traded in them, quickly cornering the
literary market between 1595 and 1600. Shakespeare’s practice as a writer thus preceded
and made possible his reputation both in the theater and in print.
viii
Table of Contents
List of Tables ...........................................................................................................x
List of Figures ........................................................................................................ xi
Introduction..............................................................................................................1
Literary Shakespeare.......................................................................................5
Literature as a Mode of Formal Exchange....................................................14
Shakespeare’s Writing Practice ....................................................................30
Chapter One: The Stylistic Self in Richard II........................................................37
Kings Fall Apart............................................................................................42
Majesty a Subject..........................................................................................55
Richard Alone ...............................................................................................70
Chapter Two: Portia’s Laboratory .........................................................................77
Shakespeare’s “if” and the Scene of Knowledge..........................................83
Contract Versus Hypothesis..........................................................................92
The Casket Hypothesis .................................................................................97
Bassanio Retested .......................................................................................107
The Shylock Experiment ............................................................................112
Chapter Three: The Medium is the Message of As You Like It ...........................121
A Multimedia Market .................................................................................127
A Mixed Media Play...................................................................................134
The Medium is the Message .......................................................................154
Chapter Four: Hamlet’s Parentheses....................................................................173
The Renaissance Parenthesis, The Parenthetical Renaissance ...................180
Hamlet’s Parentheses ..................................................................................189
Hamlet’s Parentheses ..................................................................................200
Bibliography ........................................................................................................217
ix
List of Tables
Table 1: Texts Banned or Censored by the 1599 Bishops’ Ban ..................................... 131
Table 2: Taxonomy of Parentheses in Renaissance English Literature.......................... 186
x
List of Figures
Figure 1: Excerpt from the First Folio, Sig. d2v............................................................... 39
Figure 2: As You Like It 2.6, in the First Folio and Hattaway’s Cambridge edition....... 123
Figure 3: Excerpt from the First Folio, sig. R5v............................................................. 138
Figure 4: As You Like It, 2.4.41-67, in the First Folio and Dusinberre’s Arden edition. 147
xi
Introduction
What does it mean that our greatest literary writer was, for a while, denied entry
in the greatest library of his time? In early 1612, Sir Thomas Bodley, famed library
founder, wrote a letter to Dr. Thomas James, the Bodleian Library’s first Keeper, about
what books do and do not belong in the archive. He addresses, by extension, how to
define literature. Having begun the letter dealing with problems of shelf space and book
size, Bodley takes up the question of whether the collection ought to include printed
playbooks:
I can see no good reason to alter my opinion, for excluding suche bookes, as
almanackes, plaies, & an infinit number, that are daily printed, of very vnworthy
maters & handling, such as, me thinkes, both the keeper & vnderkeeper should
disdaine to seek out, to deliuer vnto any man. Happely some plaies may be worthy
the keeping : but hardly one in fortie. For it is not alike in Englishe plaies, &
others of other nations : because they are most esteemed, for learning the
languages & many of them compiled, by men of great fame, for wisedome &
learning, which is seeldom or neuer seene among vs. Were it so againe, that some
litle profit might be reaped (which God knowes is very little) out of some of our
playbooks, the benefit therof will nothing neere contervaile, the harme that the
1
scandal will bring vnto the Librarie, when it shalbe giuen out, that we stuffe it full
of baggage books.1
Bodley refuses to include plays because their low value does not merit them a place in the
literary archive he seeks to create. There are too many plays, and they take up
“vnworthy” subjects. These unworthy and therefore excluded plays include such baggage
books as the quarto texts of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Richard III, The
Merchant of Venice, King Lear, and Hamlet, among others.2 According to Bodley, if any
plays are worthy of keeping, that value derives from their “esteem” and their association
with men famous for wisdom and learning. Yet he excludes even these plays because
their “profit” to the library is diminished by plays’ overall bad reputation. However much
he depends on the opinions of others to say what books deserve keeping, his main
criterion for including books is “what makes valuable reading.” Indeed, part of what
makes reading valuable for Bodley is that other people think it is valuable. Books worth
reading seriously belong; “baggage books” do not. As Bodley conceives of it, literature is
a function of reading.
Considering Bodley’s aims as the founder and financier of a university library,
who could blame him for defining literature in this way? “What makes valuable reading”
is exactly the distinction an archive-maker was expected to make. Even though Bodley
1 Thomas Bodley, Letters of Sir Thomas Bodley to Thomas James, First Keeper of the Bodleian
Library, ed. G. W. Wheeler (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1985), 221-22.
2 By 1612, eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays had appeared at least once in print: Titus Andronicus
(first edition 1594), 2 Henry VI (1594), 3 Henry VI (1595), Love’s Labor’s Lost (1597), Richard II (1597),
Richard III (1597), Romeo and Juliet (1597), 1 Henry IV (1598), Henry V (1600), 2 Henry IV (1600), Much
Ado About Nothing (1600), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600), The Merchant of Venice (1600), Merry
Wives of Windsor (1602), Hamlet (1603), King Lear (1608), Troilus and Cressida (1609), and Pericles
(1609). This count does not include Edward III (1596).
2
organizes the domain of literature around reading activity, however, he nevertheless sees
that activity as part of a larger system of exchange that also includes writing. His
reference to the poor “handling” of most plays gestures at the possibility that not all
literary value reduces to a matter of social standing: some plays are poorly written and
are therefore not worth reading. More important, his acknowledgment that some plays
make good reading forces him to clarify the context in which reading must be
understood. The “men of great fame” responsible for creating plays and filling them with
“wisedome & learning” produce the “profit” (however “little”) that “might be reaped.”
The agricultural image of reaping confirms that the worthy reading Bodley seeks to
preserve is the product of an exchange process. He sees himself as investing in the
“literary” assets that he thinks most capable of generating not just an economic but a
representational profit. Even though he defines literature around the practice of reading,
therefore, that notion of reading cannot be understood outside the constant interchange
between writing and reading—the planting and harvesting of language. As a librarybuilder, he is focused on a particular segment of that larger process. And although his
judgments are mostly determined by certain class-bound values (the “social provenance
of this material”), those choices are nevertheless part of an economy of representational
exchange, one that gives plays such as Shakespeare’s little or no currency.3
If William Shakespeare were to create a library, what worthy books or texts
would he include, and how would he define their value? What kind of profit would that
library provide, and how or why would his archive differ from Bodley’s? Probably the
3 Michael Bristol, Big-time Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1996), 38.
3
list would include Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland,
and Ireland, the plays of Terence and Plautus, and the Geneva Bible. Shakespeare would
also have included Plutarch’s Lives, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Troilus and
Criseyde, and More’s History of King Richard III. Aside from these source texts, as older
historicist models knew them, the library might also include texts by many of
Shakespeare’s contemporaries: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Nashe,
Robert Greene, Ben Jonson, John Marston, John Lyly, Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund
Spenser, and Samuel Daniel.4 He may include sample texts from the morality play
tradition, Senecan-style historical tragedy, or the pastoral mode. He would also allow
groups of texts about a single topic, such as the pamphlets of the Marprelate controversy,
rhetoric manuals, and defenses of poetry. Many of these books would also fit Bodley’s
criteria for inclusion, but others would not. Shakespeare’s and Bodley’s lists—and thus
their idea of what makes a book worthy—differ because of the use to which they want to
put books. Whereas Bodley sees books (or “literature”) from the perspective of a reader,
Shakespeare (as I have imagined him) sees them from that of a writer. This difference
points to the two men’s crucial similarity: both are defining the literary within an
exchange-based economy of representation. Words—often but not necessarily words in
books—are the source and product of this exchange, both asset and currency.
4 Many of Shakespeare’s classical and “historical” sources have been cataloged in Geoffrey
Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge and Paul, 1957).
Shakespeare’s reading of his contemporaries has not received such extensive treatment, but one study that
illustrates his familiarity with other dramatists and lyric poets is Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle
Shakespeare: Scenes from His Life (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001).
4
This dissertation argues that Shakespeare’s career as a writer cannot be
understood outside this verbal economy. A new focus on “literary” Shakespeare has led
us to inquire into Shakespeare’s understanding of his own achievement. Some have
argued that Shakespeare pursued fame in print, while others maintain the more
conventional belief that he was always a “man of the theater” with no interest in the print
world. Both schools of thought assume that the literary world of the printed page and the
supposedly non-literary world of the stage worked in opposition to each other, but this
binarism arises out of an incomplete understanding of literature as a product of reading
only. Against this assumption, this project argues that Shakespeare both responded to and
reshaped the literary marketplace in which he wrote. He worked in constant exchange
with other writers, texts, and trends, and that exchange makes his works literary.
Literary Shakespeare
Since the publication of Lukas Erne’s Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, the
term “literary Shakespeare” has been the source of much controversy in Shakespeare
scholarship. By now the story is familiar among Shakespeareans: during the second half
of the twentieth century, the prevailing view of Shakespeare was that he was a “man of
the theater.” Totally indifferent to the publication of his plays, Shakespeare wrote always
and only for theatrical performance in mind, except of course when he published lyric
5
poetry out of financial need.5 As Erne describes the situation, “what has remained largely
unchanged in our view of Shakespeare is that he allegedly had little interest in his
writings as personal property and even less interest in posterity.”6 Erne’s groundbreaking
study argued that over the course of his career Shakespeare became increasingly invested
in the world of print publication, and that he “became a dramatic author during his own
lifetime, writing drama for the stage and page.”7 In the aftermath, some have taken
Erne’s conclusions further while others have strongly opposed them. On one hand, for
instance, Patrick Cheney has treated Erne’s findings as premises for further exploration
of “Shakespeare’s literary authorship.”8 On the other, many of the well-regarded scholars
who contributed to the 2008 Shakespeare Studies forum on authorship found Erne’s
thesis unconvincing for a variety of reasons.9
Following centuries of scholarly precedent, the various sides of this debate over
Shakespeare’s literariness break down the representational culture of Renaissance
England into a bifurcated opposition of stage and page. Focusing so intensely on the
stakes of the debate—Shakespeare’s cultural authority into the present time—scholars
tend to assume a strong opposition between the “literary” world of print and the “sub-” or
“non-literary” world of the theater. Erne’s argument, which one might expect to break
5 See Jonas A. Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1981), 80-131.
6 Lukas Erne, Shakespeare As Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 2.
7 Ibid., 244.
8 See Patrick Cheney’s book of this title, Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2008).
9 See Susan Zimmerman and Garrett Sullivan, eds., Shakespeare Studies (Madison: Fairleigh
Dickinson UP, 2008), 19-131. The contributors include Erne himself. Cheney convened the forum largely
as a response to Erne’s book.
6
down the “stage versus page” mentality, in fact reifies it. He argues that Shakespeare
pursued stage and page instead of stage over page, writing “to be published in both
performance and in print.”10 According to Erne, a Shakespeare who wrote for both media
could only be making a counter-intuitive choice that somehow straddled two fields of
discourse: if stage and page are mighty opposites, and if Shakespeare managed to write
for both, then he must be a great “dramatic author” indeed. In the same way, David
Kastan, one of Erne’s most stringent critics, calls print and theater “discontinuous modes
of production” that “are not related as origin and effect” and “do not constitute the same
entity.” Page and stage, he claims, are “incommensurab[le].”11 In this regard, Kastan
agrees with Erne in the desire to keep the world of the theater separate from and
oppositional to the supposedly literary world of print, but he does so for exactly the
opposite reasons. For Kastan, Shakespeare is unquestionably not the “dramatic author”—
a status with all the attendant cultural baggage in tow—Erne claims him to be, but is
instead resistant to such forms of authority, at least until later generations ascribe them to
him. Whether stage and page, or stage or page, therefore, the two fields are kept
assiduously separate.
As this introduction will argue, the stage/page binarism fails to provide a
satisfactory or accurate account of the relationship between the theater and the
purportedly “literary” print world. It does so because both sides of the debate define
literature as a function of reading only, without acknowledging that reading is part of a
10 Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, 244.
11 David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), 7.
7
larger system of exchange. These scholars assume that when we call something “literary”
or count it as “literature,” we are saying that this text is meant to be read—and not just
once, but “again and again.” According to this model, Shakespeare’s plays become
literary once they become “reading matter” with a certain cultural prestige attached. In an
essay on “literary culture,” Barbara Mowat articulates this standard definition: “for the
purposes of this essay, the term literary means, generally, that which was designed to be
read, whether in print or in manuscript, whether fiction or nonfiction, high culture or low
culture.”12 As we will see, this definition is not wrong so much as it is incomplete. While
we might expect a scholar of Erne’s caliber to question the equation of literature with
reading, he simply raises the issue of precisely when plays (Shakespeare’s in particular)
were counted as “reading matter.” He points out the “great paradox” of English literary
history that “even though print had become an agent of the greatest importance in the
construction of literary reputation by the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth century,
scholarship has long taught us that Shakespeare and many of his contemporary dramatists
remained largely unaffected by these developments.”13 Instead of redefining the
“literary,” Erne redefines Shakespeare’s attitude toward it.14 Ironically, this choice makes
him miss Shakespeare’s profound, writerly engagement with both worlds.
12 Barbara A. Mowat, “The Theater and Literary Culture,” in A New History of Early English
Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia UP, 1997), 214. Mowat later
exposes the weaknesses of this definition.
13 Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, 7.
14 This trend continues: the criticism of Erne’s claims has not (with exceptions) been to question
his definition of the literature but to reject his claims that Shakespeare sought to attach to his plays the
values and expectations of readers. An important exception, which this introduction discusses later, is
Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass, “The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Professional
Plays,” Shakespeare Quarterly 59, no. 4 (2008): 371-420.
8
Perhaps tellingly, the scholarly separation of stage from page and the attendant
assumption that literature is equivalent to reading go hand in hand with the question of
authorship. Michael Bristol, in many ways a precursor to Erne in his revitalization of
Shakespeare-as-author, claims that “authorship need not be understood as a sovereign and
proprietary relationship to specific utterances.” Shakespeare, he writes, “labored in his
vocation at the selection, composition, and verbal articulation of scripts intended for
production in the theater.”15 To this, of course, Erne would add that Shakespeare
“labored” for production in print as well as theater, but the two agree that the stage world
must never be associated with the literary. Bristol offers several examples as evidence of
“a growing tension between the rival institutional regimes of popular culture as
constituted by means of a newly formed show business industry and of literature as
constituted by means of a newly formed print industry” (62). He points to Ben Jonson’s
“resentment of the exigencies of the [theatrical] market and his general view of
consumers as a kind of cultural rabble,” then to Thomas Dekker’s The Gull’s Hornbook
as complaining that “the commercial theater degrades poets to merchants,” and finally to
the way Beaumont and Fletcher’s Knight of the Burning Pestle “shows vividly how
theater can actually exploit invidious social distinctions within its audience for the
express purpose of entertaining that audience” (42). If these examples point to a tension,
it is to the one between print and theater, and not to one between literature and
supposedly sub-literary theatricality. Assuming a literature/theater split in these instances
effaces the actual distinctions being made between two equally representational media,
15 Bristol, Big-time Shakespeare, 58.
9
and it also suggests that what happens in print and what happens in theater are somehow
absolutely contradictory forms of representation. Jonson, to choose one of Bristol’s
examples, never complains that stage and page are incommensurate in every regard; he
only complains that they are different in the audiences they draw and the ways they
produce profit.
As in Bristol’s examples, much of the evidence provided to demonstrate the hard
opposition of literary page and non-literary stage in fact points to the complementarity of
stage and page as venues for writing. The understanding of literature as a function of
reading only, however, skews that evidence in favor of the hard opposition. In the essay
quoted earlier, Mowat cites several early modern English writers to show that “as a script
allowed for playing, a play was ‘theater’; as a licensed printed book, a play was itself a
part of literary culture.”16 She quotes John Marston’s complaint about The Malcontent’s
publication that “Scaenes invented, meerely to be spoken, should be inforcively
published to be read,” and Samuel Daniel’s embarrassment that necessity was “making
the stage the Speaker of [his] lynes” (217). Based on these examples, Mowat asserts the
“clear dependence of early modern theater on literary culture, on the book as source of
the play’s dramatic fiction …” (220). In keeping with her definition of “literary,” she says
that the theater depends on literary culture (i.e., the culture of book reading), but Marston
and Daniel see the situation more in terms of participation than dependence. They object
not out of stage-page enmity or subordination but because the principle of decorum with
which they wrote was breached when material suited for one venue found its way
16 Mowat, “The Theater and Literary Culture,” 217.
10
unchanged into another. They are responding as writers as well as readers. By contrast,
when Mowat writes that playtexts “clearly entered literary culture as manuscripts and
printed texts,” she is looking only at the reading side of that literary culture, ignoring that
the very same activities that turn play into playbook also produced the play in the first
place (225).
Even those scholars who purport to be writing about writing still hold onto an
identification of literature with reading and therefore see stage and page as
incommensurable. Many reviewers of Erne’s book took him to be blurring the distinction
between page and stage, but his argument actually does quite the opposite.17 In perhaps
the most compelling chapter of the book, Erne argues that the “bad” and “good” texts of
Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, and Hamlet are respectively “theatrical” and “literary”
versions. For him, the “literary” features of the longer texts are unnecessary to the
requirements of the theatrical medium, and thus the shorter texts omit many such features
in order to un-complicate the action and flatten out the “round characters” (231). In
contrast, longer texts are not so “ideologically straightforward,” and they “invite us to
inquire into a character who conveys a strong sense of interiority and psychological
complexity” (236). These distinctions reveal Erne’s understanding of the literary as
comprising those qualities that history would come to expect from imaginative writing in
print. In other words, he still sees literariness as a function of reading. Zachary Lesser
and Peter Stallybrass, responding to Erne, argue that Hamlet’s “bad” quarto is in fact a
17 See, for example, Colin Burrow, “Review of Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist,” Shakespeare
Quarterly 55, no. 3 (2004): 322-25.
11
literary text because certain passages are marked as commonplaces, which an interested
reader could copy into a commonplace book. They disagree with what they see as Erne’s
belief that “literary drama originates in the author himself,” arguing instead that literary
drama as it was created through commonplace markers emerged primarily through the
activity of readers, not authors” (414). Even as they criticize Erne’s conception of
literariness, they nevertheless recapitulate his assumption that what makes a play (or any
other text) literary is that it is read.
The problem with this widespread and exclusive focus on reading—and especially
print reading—is that it tends to leave out the practices of writing that make up the
literary system. This focus renders static what was an incredibly dynamic system. Why,
one might ask by way of example, if the supposedly “literary” print world and the “nonliterary” theater world are so incommensurable, did the two worlds peak during the same
decade, the 1590s? As a historical claim, defining literature as a function of reading goes
directly against what early modern writers thought about writing. Humanism, for
instance, offered basic principles for writing and reading, principles that lasted
throughout the period. The focus on reading also overlooks the very action of writing
itself. The critics above rightly think about how different media appeal to paying
audiences, and how various institutions and agents helped bring a text-commodity into
being, but they overlook the extent to which one or more persons putting pen to paper
may have participated in these processes. Bristol, in an inspired moment of authorial
resurrection, describes “Shakespeare’s vocation” both as “the practice of a craft and as
the production of a commodity in the context of a nascent show business.” Before taking
12
writing too seriously, though, he goes on: “However, neither craft nor commodity require
play scripts to be finished literary forms” (58). As we have seen, Bristol thinks of
literariness purely in terms of what can be read, even when he is specifically discussing a
writer; but more importantly, as a consequence of this definition, he overlooks that
“craft” is itself a “commodity” that forms the literary system. Without the craft of
writing, our picture of that system is incomplete.
As its very title promises, “Shakespeare’s Writing Practice” aims to complete this
picture with respect to the best-known Renaissance writer. Shakespeare read and wrote
within a literary system of constant interchange made possible by reading and writing.
That exchange took place first and foremost at the formal level—at the level of words,
rhetorical figures, genres, plotlines, styles, rhythms, songs, stage figures, and more.
Shakespeare saw theater and print not as “incommensurable” worlds but as neighbors in
the literary marketplace, and he exploited them as such in and through his writings.
Literature, in this sense, is both the product of exchange and the site of further exchange.
“Shakespeare’s Writing Practice” argues that to understand what is literary in
Shakespeare’s plays we must look at his practices as a writer, in particular his constant
exchange with other texts, writers, trends, and ideas—an exchange that happens primarily
at the formal level. In other words, to see Shakespeare’s literariness clearly, we must look
at the words, forms, and figures of speech that constitute the basis of his achievement.
Over and against the commonly held belief that “there is little in the way of reliable
evidence that could be used to reconstruct a historical description of Shakespeare’s actual
practice of writing or of his engagement with particular social addresses,” I argue that
13
Shakespeare’s “engagement” with “social addresses” may be found precisely in his
“actual practice of writing.”18 The formal features of Shakespeare’s plays do not simply
refer to social relations; they are themselves part of those social relations. Indeed, the real
literary Shakespeare and the literary system in which this project places him are
complementary, mutually reinforcing visions: as we see Shakespeare writing—in and
through the formal features of his plays and poems—the parameters of the larger system
come more sharply into view. We begin to see the Renaissance through one of its greatest
writers.
Literature as a Mode of Formal Exchange
The hard opposition of stage and page I am resisting here has proven useful for
seeing the ways the print and theater worlds operate as distinctive modes of fictionmaking.19 But that opposition also obscures the properly literary similarities between
them and, indeed, the way they both belonged to a larger literary marketplace. As we
began to see in the previous section, the “stage vs. page” mentality is the result of
understanding literature as a function of reading only. If texts are literary only when they
are (in Mowat’s words) “designed to be read,” then any text that does not demonstrate
such a design must not be literary, over and against any characteristics it may share with
18 Bristol, Big-time Shakespeare, 57.
19 Such “stage-to-page” studies include William Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of
Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997); Douglas A. Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House:
Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000); Robert Weimann,
Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre, Cambridge Studies in
Renaissance Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000); and Tiffany Stern, Making
Shakespeare: From Stage to Page (London: Routledge, 2004).
14
texts that are. Indeed, the stage/page opposition begins to break down once we note that
what we typically call literary shares many significant qualities with what we call nonliterary, theatrical, or popular. Theatrical and “reading” texts featured eloquent language,
a fact that reminds us that early modern rhetorical theorists understood eloquence as a
value of both spoken and written discourse. Both stage and page texts were products of
imitation, in which plots, styles, images, words, and poetic forms could be borrowed for
one or another medium. The two worlds also operated within specific generic
conventions: not only did the theater have its own genres (e.g., revenge tragedy), but it
also shared many of the “literary” world’s genres (e.g., pastoral comedy). Each world had
also developed overlapping systems of remuneration, in which spoken or written words
became not merely commodities but assets. The two worlds were, in short, part of the
same system of exchange.
Stage and page were, in this regard, not enemies but neighborly media—
sometimes friendly, sometimes envious. Consider, by way of illustration, texts we think
of as “literary” according to Mowat’s definition: Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene,
Ben Jonson’s lyric poems, John Donne’s Songs and Sonets, Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, and
Chapman’s translation of the Iliad. According to the usual “literary vs. theatrical”
opposition, what makes these texts literary is that they were written for a reading public,
an audience who would encounter them in book format and who recognized in these
books a certain set of values. As Erne would be quick to point out, many plays were
published with exactly the same set of values, but he would do so on the assumption that
the plays had crossed over into the world of literature-as-reading. What, then, about a
15
play that never or only later made it into print, such as some of those in Shakespeare’s
First Folio? Could not its parts or scribal copies be gathered and the whole text published
as “literary”? The very ease of this transition from stage to page suggests that the two
venues were not so sharply opposed as Erne or Kastan think. The play was written by
means of a process that precedes, even supersedes, the convenient opposition of print and
theater. Thus the stage/page relationship is far more dialogic than it is antagonistic.
Mowat concedes that this relationship, “which seems initially intriguing and complicated,
finally collapses into a semi-identity as the extant playscript absorbs the world of writing
in which it developed and becomes in turn an integral part of that world” (228). But
Mowat’s definition of the literary (“designed to be read”) contains the suggestion that the
playtext was always, already “an integral part” of this “world of writing”: the notion that
designers—writers, and sometimes even authors—participate in a process of design, and
that they are themselves readers of texts.
Literary criticism over the last four decades has operated upon the understanding
of literature that Mowat articulates, and this trend has shaped the way “literary”
Shakespeare has been conceptualized. If Raymond Williams was not the very first critic
to promote reading as the domain of the literary, he nevertheless gave such a definition its
clearest and most influential expression. Appealing to the history of the word “literature”
itself as a noun of condition, Williams noted that the term did not have its modern,
specialized reference to certain kinds of writing—creative, fictional writing—until the
nineteenth century. He concluded that in early modern England, “literature”
“corresponded mainly to the modern meanings of ‘literacy’” and thus meant “both an
16
ability to read and a condition of being well-read.”20 Late twentieth-century cultural
materialists and new historicists ran with this reconceptualization, which offered a
liberating alternative to more privileged notions of literature that obtained among “old”
historicists and New Critics. As Sean Keilen succinctly writes, since Williams “suggested
that it is historically inappropriate to describe vernacular writing in Renaissance England
as ‘literature,’” there occurred a “shift of our object of study from ‘literature’ to
‘discourse.’”21 This shift in focus from literature-as-writing to literature-as-reading
eventually produces definitions like Mowat’s, which, although different from Williams’,
still exclude writing as a constraint upon the literary domain. In this mode of thought,
Shakespeare’s only chance at becoming literary is within an argument such as Erne’s,
which concedes literariness to the reader alone.
The early modern definition of “literature” seems to confirm the predominant
view, revitalized by Williams and developed in subsequent decades, but in fact it points
to a mode of exchange that includes both reading and writing. The OED offers a
straightforward definition: “Acquaintance with ‘letters’ or books; polite or humane
learning.”22 Thus, to refer to one’s “literature” is to refer to one’s familiarity with certain
books, or with certain kinds of books. This usage, the only one available in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, would disappear by the early nineteenth century. As Williams
rightly recognizes, from the eighteenth century onward—and certainly in the debates over
20 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1985), 184.
21 Sean Keilen, Vulgar Eloquence: On the Renaissance Invention of English Literature (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 4.
22 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “literature” 1.
17
Shakespeare’s literariness in the last decade—literature corresponds to a set of values
including but not limited to the value of the printed page, of authorship in the modern
sense (itself a function of the printed page), and of certain genres and media (also
functions of print). By contrast, in the context of sixteenth-century humanism and the
culture of letters that followed it, “literature” in the Renaissance was a set of enabling
conditions. This point bears repeating: Williams is correct in arguing that literature in the
Renaissance was a noun of condition. Yet we must ask, in turn, for what it was a
condition. As it was used in the early modern period, the word carries with it the strong
implication of a progressive activity. Francis Bacon’s description of King James as a king
“learned in all literature and erudition, divine and human”—quoted by both Williams and
the OED—indicates that this learning was meant for demonstration as well as
absorption.23 Bacon’s use also assumes that the chief means of demonstrating “literary”
learning was to write. As Bodley similarly recognized in his letter to the library keeper, to
“have literature” meant to be well-read and, in the context of that reading, to be capable
of writing. Reading without writing is insufficient to constitute “literature,” but this is not
to suggest that all early modern writings would qualify as literary in the earliest sense,
nor that we should consider as literary only those texts that the early modern era deemed
literary (especially because that list was never consistent from time to time and person to
person). Rather, it shows how the current critical understanding of literature as a function
of reading fails to account for the reading-writing exchange at the heart of the
Renaissance literary imaginary. In this sense, Keilen is correct to argue that “literature of
23 Francis Bacon, The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), 121.
18
the English Renaissance has integrity as an object of study,” except that whereas Keilen
refers principally to a body of texts, literature as a condition for activity implies a mode
of exchange in which those texts are used and produced.24
Where twenty-first century readers and writers use the word “literature,”
Shakespeare would use “poesy” or “poetry.” Implicit in these two synonyms, as in
“literature” and “literary,” is the economy of reading and writing. “Poetry,” instead of
pointing to the conditions of exchange, refers to the product of that exchange and to the
means of production. OED defines poesy simply as “a poetic composition; a poem” and
“an inventive or imaginative composition.”25 Similarly, “poetry” is defined as both
“imaginative or creative literature in general” and “the art or work of a poet.”26 One who
had literature could in turn produce poetry, along with other forms of writing. In 1586,
William Webbe described poetry as:
the arte of making: which word, as it hath alwaies beene especially used of the
best of our English Poets to express the very faculty of speaking or wryting
Poetically, so doth it in deede containe most fitly the whole grace and property of
the same, the more fullye and effectually then any other English Verbe.27
For Webbe and for many others, poetry includes both speech and writing, an opinion that
cuts across the perceived opposition between stage and page. He sees poetry as making or
producing verbal texts based on an imitative process of reading and writing. Once again,
24 Keilen, Vulgar Eloquence, 9.
25 OED, s.v. “poesy” 1a.
26 OED, s.v. “poetry” 1 & 2.
27 In G. Gregory Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, vol. 1. (London: Oxford University
Press, 1971), 230.
19
however, this is not to suggest that all writing counts as poetry, an error Philip Sidney
famously denounces in The Defence of Poesy:
Verse [is] but an ornament and no cause to poetry, since there have been many
most excellent poets that never versified, and now swarm many versifiers that
need never answer to the name of poets.28
Neither Webbe nor Sidney uses economic language to talk about poetry, but they both
describe the poet’s art as a product of the reading-writing intersection and not merely as a
set of texts deemed worthwhile by readers. Discussing just this question, Stephen Cohen
affirms that “while New Historicism seeks to assert literature’s cultural power by
downplaying literary exceptionalism and emphasizing its continuity with other
discourses, Sidney seeks to defend poetry's cultural value by distinguishing it from other
discourses as singularly efficacious.”29 Sidney and Webbe set poetry apart as an activity
and as the product of that activity, rather than merely as a quality of texts. Although what
counts as poetic and literary could and did change during the period, writers continued to
engage the world around them by means of the reading-writing exchange—taking from
what they read and “making” something with it. Indeed, precisely because readers used
their “literature” to produce writing or “poetry,” what counted as poetry was continually
in flux both over time and across different social structures.
28 Sir Philip Sidney, The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002),
218.
29 Stephen Cohen, “Introduction,” in Shakespeare and Historical Formalism (Aldershot, England:
Ashgate, 2007), 9.
20
But if early modern literary culture operates as a system of exchange, what gets
exchanged? In a word, forms. Plots, genres, character types, rhetorical figures, writing
and speaking styles, metrical forms, modes of address, and particular words make up the
currencies and commodities of Renaissance literature. To see what Douglas Bruster calls
the “representational marketplace” of Shakespeare’s time is to look not merely at the
circulation patterns of books, money, and people but essentially at the circulation of
formal features in the economy of representational writing.30 When, for example, Ben
Jonson turns Aesop’s fable about a fox into Volpone, a formal exchange takes place
whereby Jonson perpetuates the fable’s legacy and in turn creates a striking stage figure.
Recent scholarship, going under the label “historical formalism” and sometimes “new
formalism,” seeks to “reveal literature to be not simply a site of ideological confirmation
or contradiction, but a model of a more multivalent social interaction, and an engine of
social and political change.”31 In other words, forms are both the site and means of
writers’ engagement with their world and other texts and writers in it. This understanding
of form would have made sense to early modern writers, because they worked within a
tradition (e.g., humanist education, classical learning) and cultural practice (e.g.,
imitation, eloquence, adaptation) based on formal interchange. For this reason, William
Empson’s claim still rings true that “a profound enough criticism could extract an entire
cultural history from a simple lyric.”32 Every lyric is the product of the activity of literary
30 See Douglas Bruster, “The Representational Market of Early Modern England,” forthcoming.
31 Cohen, “Introduction,” 15.
32 William Empson, Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture (London: Chatto & Windus,
1987), 107. See also Richard Strier, “How Formalism Became a Dirty Word, and Why We Can’t Do
21
exchange. A sonnet, for instance, is the result of one or more writers’ imitation of (and
thus exchange with) the sonnet conventions and even other sonnets, and as a sonnet it
interacts not merely with the sonnet tradition and with specific sonnets and sonneteers,
but also with other discourses. To historicize forms—to extract from single lyrics the
kinds of cultural histories that Empson promises—means both to scrutinize the
“thickness” of those forms and to show how writers are exchanging them, and
exchanging with them.33 And, as we will see, there was perhaps no better exchanger in
the English Renaissance than William Shakespeare.
The use here of economic language to describe literary interactions has many
precedents, both in the Renaissance and in modern criticism. Pierre Bourdieu, who might
best be called a sociologist of language, analyzed “the economics of linguistic exchange”
throughout his career. In a seminal essay, he argued that “the science of discourse has to
take account of the conditions for the establishment of communication because the
anticipated conditions of reception are part of the conditions of production.”34 For
Bourdieu, writing (the conditions of production) and reading (the conditions of reception)
are inseparable in the context of any attempt to study a particular discourse, a point that
articulates in economic terms the literary activity that this project seeks to study. At the
same time, however, Bourdieu argues that the “raison d’être of a discourse” is located in
Without It,” in Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements, ed. Mark David Rasmussen (New
York: Palgrave, 2002), 207-15.
33 On form as constituting social relations, see Theodor Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,”
in Notes to Literature, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Nicholsen Shierry Weber, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia
UP, 1991), 37-54.
34 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Economics of Linguistic Exchanges,” Social Science Information 16, no.
6 (1977): 649. See also Bourdieu’s much more extensive Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of
Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), esp. 169-255.
22
“the socially defined site from which it is uttered, i.e., in the relevant properties of a
position within the field of class relations or within a particular field, such as the
intellectual or the scientific field” (657). Even as he argues for the inseparability of
reading and writing in a linguistic economy such as the Renaissance literary marketplace,
Bourdieu collapses the creative agent responsible for literary exchanges—the writer—
into a sociolinguistic habitus produced by social structures. Pace Bourdieu, this project
maintains that we do not have to abandon the creative agency of Shakespeare or any
other writers in order to understand the “position” of literary writings, including
Shakespeare’s plays. Rather than pure linguistic interpellation into a social “position,”
Shakespeare’s writing practice resembles what Wilbur Sanders called “creative
assimilation.”35
The notion of the literary as a mode of exchange is not anachronistic. Indeed, it
was an unavoidable byproduct of the humanist educational program, even when that
program was called into question. Three of the guiding principles of humanism and
subsequently of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writings—copiousness, eloquence,
and imitation—perpetuate and operate within the mode of formal exchange that this
introduction has been describing. In The Scholemaster, Roger Ascham describes how “all
35 Wilbur Sanders, writing before Bourdieu, may as well be responding to Bourdieu’s position:
“The artist also enters into a relationship with his culture, in which he is much more the receiver. The
process extends over his entire lifespan within society. Throughout this period he is being moulded, incited,
balked or infuriated by the multilateral pressures that go to make up social existence. Here again the
relationship is one neither of dependence nor independence. It is a kind of creative assimilation. I use the
organic metaphor because the assumption of an instrumental relationship, as of sculptor to marble, seems to
me highly misleading—artist and material are inextricably confounded. The intellectual climate in which
the artist lives is partly of his own creation. He can only receive the ‘received ideas’ of his age by making
them part of his own metabolism.” See Wilbur Sanders, The Dramatist and the Received Idea: Studies in
the Plays of Marlowe & Shakespeare (London: Cambridge UP, 1968), 7.
23
languages, both learned and mother tonges, be gotten, and gotten onelie by Imitation. For
as ye use to heare, so ye learne to speake: if ye heare no other, ye speake not your selfe:
and whome ye onelie heare, of them ye onelie learne.”36 Ascham’s book comprises a
laundry list of texts to be read so that one may write well: hearing and speaking, along
with reading and writing, are related through this process of interchange. George
Puttenham, describing a slightly different sort of imitation, claims that “a poet may in
some sense be said a follower or imitator, because he can express the true and lively of
every thing that is set before him; and so in that respect is both a maker and a
counterfeiter, and poesy an art not only of making, but also of imitation.”37 As with
Webbe’s definition of poetry quoted above, Puttenham sees the poet’s art as one of
creation or making, but that very act involves taking from something else in an act of
formal exchange. Finally, Sidney, apparently arguing for the poet’s originality, points
instead to the same imitative exchange: “Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such
subjection, lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect another
nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms
such as never were in nature, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and
such like.”38 For Sidney, the poet’s “invention” leads him/her to create fictions not seen
in nature. Those fictions, which Sidney calls “forms,” do not come from nowhere,
36 In Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, vol. 1, 5.
37 George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn
(Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2007), 93.
38 Sidney, 216.
24
however. They derive at least in part from other writings, with which the poet engages at
the formal level of character type.
Notwithstanding Sidney’s dismissal of the popular theater, when we view the
early modern literary culture as a system of formal exchange, the stage falls along with
the page into that economy of fictional writing. It does not oversimplify the situation to
point out that playwrights read mostly the same body of texts that poets did, even across
social class boundaries. It is also crucial to note that most playwrights, including
Shakespeare, also wrote in what we usually think of as “literary” genres such as lyric
poetry and even printed prose fiction. The gap between stage and page, so often
construed in scholarship as a huge one separating two “incommensurable” opposites,
seems instead to have been relatively easy to cross. Thomas Dekker’s The Gull’s
Hornbook offers a vivid crystallization of the stage as a literary system—that is, as a
system of formal exchange:
THE Theater is your Poets Royal Exchange, upon which, their Muses (that are
now turnd to Merchants) meeting, barter away that light commodity of words for
a lighter ware then words. Plaudities and the Breath of the great Beast, which (like
the threatnings of two Cowards) vanish all into aire. Plaiers [are] their Factors,
who put away the stuffe, and make the best of it they possibily can (as indeed tis
their parts so to doe)[. Y]our Gallant, your Courtier and your Capten, had wont to
be the soundest paymaisters, and I thinke are still the surest chapmen: and these
by meanes that their heades are well stockt, deale upon this comical freight by the
25
grosse: when your Groundling, and Galley Commoner buyes his sport by the
penny, and, like a Hagler, is glad to utter it againe by retailing.39
Often quoted in discussions of commercialism in the early modern theater, Dekker’s
description shows how words on the stage become commodities and are exchanged for
applause, and ultimately for money. Words are the “light commodity” for sale in the
theater, but they may also be construed as the currency that purchases applause—or
citation. The “sport” of words purchased by the groundlings maintains a monetary value
which can be “retailed” (when the words are retold, in Dekker’s clever pun). Most
importantly, the whole “exchange” begins with poets, who have already participated in
the exchange process of poetic composition, a process that involves, at the formal level,
appropriating from other texts and engaging with other discourses and practices.
Dekker was a playwright whose comment on theatrical exchange came in The
Gull’s Hornbook, a printed prose satire. 2 Return from Parnassus, quite the opposite, is a
play that illustrates a similar exchange in print. Two characters, Ingenioso and Iudicio,
criticize English poetry, and in particular the equal treatment received by writers not
trained in the university.40 After perusing a copy of the poetry anthology Bel-vedere, the
two men comment on the writers included in it:
Iud[icio].
As for these, they haue some of them beene the old hedgstakes of the
presse, and some of them are at this instant the botts and glanders of the
39 Thomas Dekker, The Guls Horne-Booke (London: [By Nicholas Okes] for R. S[ergier?], 1609),
27-28.
40 See Lesser and Stallybrass, “The First Literary Hamlet,” 387-94.
26
printing house. Fellowes that stand onely vpon tearmes to serue the
tearme, with their blotted papers, write as men goe to stoole, for needes,
and when they write, they write as a Beare pisses, now and then drop a
pamphlet.
Ing[enioso].
Durum telum necessitas. [Necessity is a strong weapon.] Good fayth they
do as I do, exchange words for mony, I haue some traffique this day with
Danter, about a little booke which I haue made, the name of it is a
Catalogue of Cambridge Cuckolds, but this Beluedere, this methodicall
asse, hath made me almost forget my time: Ile now to Paules Churchyard
meete me an houre hence, at the signe of the Pegasus in Cheap-side, and
Ile moyst thy temples with a cuppe of Claret, as hard as the world goes.41
Words become commodities. In the case of the writers in Bel-vedere, words are the
“tearmes” (terms) produced in material need. Iudicio’s complaint is not that they write, or
even that they write for money, but that they have become the “botts” (parasites) and
“glanders” (diseases) of the press. Ingenioso, perhaps mildly defending their actions,
concedes that he makes the same words-for-money exchange. How then does this
moment illustrate a literary marketplace not just of monetary but of formal, verbal
exchange? Because Iudicio and Ingenioso are not just talking about any sort of books:
they are talking about commonplace books of poetic “flowers,” which reprint selections
41 The Retvrne from Pernassvs: Or The Scourge of Simony (London: Printed by G. Eld, for Iohn
Wright, 1606), sig. B2v.
27
from poets. The very thing that makes the “exchange of words for money” possible is the
prior exchange of words for words within formal poetic conventions. The whole point of
a commonplace book—be it Bel-vedere or one more acceptable to Ingenioso and
Iudicio’s sensibilities—is that it has appropriated from one text (or set of texts) in order
that a reader may in turn use those “flowers” for their own purposes, either to cite or,
more commonly, to adapt. This literary activity precedes and indeed animates the
monetary exchange in Paul’s churchyard, even as that monetary exchange motivates
further literary activity.
A clear, localized example of this exchange system in operation seems helpful.
England’s Helicon (1600), a poetry anthology published by the same man who published
Bel-vedere, reprints Christopher Marlowe’s well-known poem “The Passionate
Shepherd.” The opening lines read:
Come liue with mee, and be my loue,
And we will all the pleasures proue,
That Vallies, groues, hills and fieldes,
Woods, or steepie mountaine yeeldes.42
The poem, which is itself in deep, formal engagement with the pastoral poetic tradition,
offers an apparently simple picture of a shepherd’s love. Immediately following this
poem, however, is the reply, often attributed to Walter Ralegh:
If all the world and loue were young,
And truth in euery Sheepheards tongue,
42 Englands Helicon (At London: Printed by I. R[oberts] for Iohn Flasket, 1600), sig. Aav.
28
These pretty pleasures might me moue,
To liue with thee, and be thy loue. (sig. Aa2)
Appropriating the verse structure and tone of Marlowe’s poem, this poem offers the
beloved’s strong riposte to the shepherd’s plea. It exchanges Marlowe’s imperative
“Come live” for a conditional “might … live,” and in doing so exposes the assumptions
driving the first poem. Just after this second poem, a third poem is printed, which begins:
Come liue with mee, and be my deere,
And we will reuell all the yeere,
In plaines and groaues, on hills and dales:
Where fragrant ayre breedes sweetest gales. (sig. Aa2v)
Perhaps less alluring than Ralegh’s reply, this poem nevertheless exchanges with
Marlowe’s, and it does so by means of the lyric’s distinctive form. This formal exchange
is the condition for artistry and meaning, and as a result, understanding the exchange
leads in turn to interpretive claims about the text or texts in question. In this case, the
response poems unpack the complicated relationship between love and power that begins
in Marlowe’s poem. Ralegh’s reply seems to resist equating the two things, while the
third poem willingly equates them by maintaining the original syntactic structure and
even making the poem less serious. The exchanges did not stop with England’s Helicon,
however. The poem’s fame grew, inspiring various quotations, adaptations, and reimaginings, including those by Shakespeare in Merry Wives (3.1.13-26) and John Donne
29
in “The Bait.”43 At the heart of what makes these texts literary is the exchange they make
at the formal level. By means of this exchange—that is, in and through the formal
features of their writings—writers engaged meaningfully with other writers, texts, trends,
ideas, and events. What is more, as this example illustrates, the system of formal
exchange does not preclude change over time but facilitates it. Almost like publicly
traded stocks, Marlowe’s lines gained in value as they changed hands, so that in As You
Like It, Shakespeare could refer to a “dead shepherd” and count on his audience
recognizing the reference to Marlowe by way of the famous pastoral lyric.
Shakespeare’s Writing Practice
Within the system of literary exchange traced above—a system it is only partly
metaphorical to call a marketplace—Shakespeare worked for two decades as a playwright
and lyric poet. The longstanding image of him as a man of the theater, along with the
more recent claim that he strove to become a “literary dramatist,” would insist on
separating the roles of playwright and print poet as two completely contradictory modes
of discourse. As we have seen, however, literariness is a function not merely of reading
but of writing, and thus theatrical writing is just as capable of entering the literary world
as print writing is. This project tells the story of Shakespeare’s remarkable entry into and
transformation of the literary marketplace. Notwithstanding the various other agents and
43 Donne’s poem begins, “Come live with me, and be my love, / And we will some new pleasures
prove.” See John Donne, The Major Works, ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990), 117. See also
Douglas Bruster, Quoting Shakespeare: Form and Culture in Early Modern Drama (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2000), 52-87.
30
institutions that helped produce his “literary” authority during his career and in the
centuries after his death, Shakespeare’s own achievement should not be mistaken for
anything but a literary one in its own right. Whether or not he cared about the publication
of his plays—and he seems to have cared at least a little, even if he did not actively seek
the status of author—his writings demonstrate a deep engagement with the system of
literary exchange. This engagement, which occurs in and through the formal features of
his works, preceded and made possible both his reputation in print and his success as a
man of the theater. By showing how he uses culturally “thick” formal features to write
powerful drama, this project offers an account of the deeply literary nature of
Shakespeare’s writing practice.
But why Shakespeare? If early modern literariness worked as this introduction has
argued, then why not study other writers, such as Jonson or Middleton, whose works also
engage with the literary system? Why, in other words, should we set Shakespeare apart
from other writers in this regard? This question bears an uncanny resemblance to the
question of how or why we should set apart literary exchange from other forms of
writing. The answer to “Why Shakespeare?” resembles the answer, formulated in this
introduction, to the question “Why literature?” Robert Greene pointed to the answer
when he famously called Shakespeare an “upstart crow, beautified with our feathers.”44
He is not merely complaining that Shakespeare is taking from other writers; everyone did
that, including Greene himself. The complaint is that the use Shakespeare made of others’
44 Robert Greene, Greenes, groats-worth of witte, bought with a million of repentance (London :
Imprinted [by J. Wolfe and J. Danter] for William Wright, 1592), sig. Fv.
31
“feathers” amounted to a noticeably valuable (“beautified”) product. Greene is upset
because Shakespeare is writing good, and presumably profitable, drama using the
resources of other writers, whom Greene considered Shakespeare’s social betters.
Shakespeare distinguished himself from his contemporaries by engaging at various
formal levels with various texts in complex and compelling ways. Shakespeare was, as
Cohen argues, “the period’s most formally versatile and self-aware author.”45 Hence the
notorious “thickness” of his writing, even compared to other highly engaged writers.46
Bristol hints at this complexity when he observes that “Shakespeare … has become both
an enduring institution and a source of cultural authority not by virtue of cheap and
meretricious celebrity but because the works produced are already richly dialogized and
thus answerable to unforeseen social and cultural circumstances.”47 Bristol’s claim
confirms and extends upon Bakhtin’s pronouncement that “Shakespeare, like every artist,
constructed his works not out of dead elements, not out of bricks, but out of forms
already heavy with meanings, filled with them.”48 This is the source and instrument of
Shakespeare’s literariness.
Most studies of “literary” Shakespeare focus on the second half of his career,
from 1600 onward. According to Erne, it was during this period that Shakespeare and his
45 Cohen, “Introduction,” 10.
46 Studies and editions that attest to this thickness include M. M. Mahood, Shakespeare’s
Wordplay (London: Methuen, 1957); S. S. Hussey, The Literary Language of Shakespeare, 2nd ed.
(London: Longman, 1992); David Willbern, Poetic Will: Shakespeare and the Play of Language
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed.
Stephen Booth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
47 Bristol, Big-Time Shakespeare, 11.
48 M. M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl
Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 4.
32
company fully enacted their strategy for publishing revised versions of playbooks.49
Scholars hesitant to accept this claim look at the same period to argue exactly the
opposite: that Shakespeare remained completely indifferent to print publication. But once
the focus of literariness shifts from reading to the reading-writing exchange, we are free
to look back on his earlier years, when he was becoming increasingly responsive to the
texts, trends, and writers around him. From 1595 to 1600, as Shakespeare went from
player and playwright to shareholder and faceman of his company, he also went from
literary entrepreneur to a titan of the representational industry. Once again, the economic
language is only partly metaphorical, because Shakespeare’s “investment” in formal
commodities ultimately produced monetary profits of several sorts. The four chapters of
this project show Shakespeare’s increasingly sophisticated formal engagement with the
literary marketplace, an engagement that went hand-in-hand with writing highly complex
and meaningful plays. During this five-year span, Shakespeare became remarkably adept
at exploiting the formal features he encountered and turning them into powerful—and
profitable—drama.
Chapter One shows how in Richard II, Shakespeare exploits the grammatical and
literary status of reflexive pronouns to explore selfhood and subjectivity. Texts on stage
and page in the early 1590s, including Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II and Samuel
Daniel’s historical poem The Civil Wars, use reflexive pronouns to dramatize
Christianized Stoicism that was fashionable in literary and court circles. In Richard II,
Shakespeare capitalizes on this trend to make reflexivity the basis for a sense of self.
49 See Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, 78-114.
33
While many treatments of the play see Richard moving from a unified kingly identity to a
fragmented one, in fact only when Richard says “now mark me how I will undo myself”
in the deposition scene does he speak for the first time as if he has a unified “self” to
undo. Speaking reflexively allows Richard to master the (Stoic) ambiguity between a
whole self and a fragmented one. While we might think of Richard’s strong interiority as
the play’s main literary quality, what actually makes the play literary is Richard’s
persistent use of a word (“myself”) that is both a theatrical self-gesture and a readerfriendly act of grammatical self-possession.
Turning from single words to syntactic structures, Chapter Two illuminates the
notoriously difficult play The Merchant of Venice by shifting interpretive focus from
social relations to the changing state of Renaissance knowledge, and to the certainty
offered by the comedic form. The “if-then” constructions that frequently mark characters’
speeches throughout the play are written in the same spirit of inductive scientific
reasoning that is previewed in Francis Bacon’s 1597 Essays. Like Bacon, many of the
play’s characters use conditional statements to induce general knowledge from observed
facts—as Shylock’s “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” derives the shared humanity of
Jews and Christians from the observable fact of blood. Portia’s conditionals, such as “If
you do love me, you will find me out,” finally outdo all others because hers operate as
hypotheses to be tested rather than as pure Baconian induction from facts to knowledge.
The play’s much-discussed failure to offer a satisfying resolution derives from the way
Shakespeare refuses to allow any of the play’s tests to achieve certainty.
34
Chapter Three shifts the focus from Shakespeare’s engagement with particular
questions or issues that were part of the literary marketplace (the self, the problem of
knowledge) to his engagement with the marketplace as a whole. In As You Like It,
Shakespeare creates a peculiar combination of prose and verse that constitutes his
response to the formally multifaceted literary marketplace of 1599. To this copious
marketplace, in which a huge variety of genres, prose and verse writing styles, modes of
address, and subject matters circulated in theatrical, print, and manuscript venues,
Shakespeare offers a copious response. A reflection of its literary context, As You Like It
is filled with verse forms and prose styles, with genres and allusions, and with
meaningful textual problems, all of which are most fully comprehensible on the printed
page. In spite of the critical history of the play, which sees it as Shakespeare’s most
metatheatrical, its medium actually becomes its message, a fact that helps explain why
nothing seems to happen. The how of this bare-plotted play—all the ways of speaking
and writing—becomes the what—the very subject in question. Once we see that nothing
happens in the plot because everything is happening in the forms, the styles, and the text,
the Forest of Arden suddenly comes alive as a literary marketplace in itself.
Finally, Chapter Four shows Shakespeare at his most meta-literary, in the sense
that in and through the formal features of Hamlet he considers the nature of literature
itself. This chapter evaluates the striking congruence between the rhetorical figure
parenthesis and Hamlet’s action, speech, and dramatic structure. Parentheses appear
everywhere in the play, from actual occurrences of the figure, through the many
parenthetical phrases and clauses as well as the soliloquies, down to the structure of the
35
play itself, which can be read as a giant parenthesis, or, as Hamlet would put it, an
“interim,” between the revelation of his father’s murder and the vengeance it requires.
Renaissance rhetoricians such as George Puttenham and Henry Peacham define
parenthesis paradoxically as both providing crucial information and as being an
unnecessary disruption of the sentence’s syntax. Clearly working on the basis of such a
definition, Shakespeare uses the parenthesis as a means to meditate on the very nature of
the literary, which is an interruption, an “interim,” in our everyday lives that at the same
time, like Hamlet's soliloquies, provides us with profound insight into the nature of
things.
36
Chapter One: The Stylistic Self in Richard II
When Shakespeare began to write Richard II in 1595, he had completed nine
plays. Five of them were Senecan-style historical tragedies.1 They featured no small
amount of on-stage fighting and gruesome death, lengthy set-speeches in blank verse and
rhymed couplets, and dramatized historical events with nationalistic implications. Most
importantly, they featured strongly, even Stoically self-possessed figures. In 1 Henry VI ,
the uncompromising Lord Talbot dies heroically in battle, and although Henry VI shows
little sign of self-possession (to his and England’s cost), his wife Margaret does. Titus
Andronicus so dedicates himself to constant allegiance that he kills his own son. Richard
III, who demonstrates a different sort of self-possession, works his way steadily toward
the crown. Figures such as these in Shakespeare’s early plays show a curious indifference
to death, if only in their last moments, and they often appeal to a deep interiority for their
sense of self.
Shakespeare was hardly alone in showing the influence of Seneca and of Stoicism
more generally. In the 1595 London literary marketplace, Stoicism was everywhere—as
an ethical system, a particular kind of character and speech, and a way of thinking about
and talking about the self as the unit by which all else is measured. Stage figures such as
Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Kyd’s Hieronimo demonstrated a clear Senecan pedigree, to
the extent that Kyd’s play was later printed with the unmistakably Senecan subtitle
1 Those five include the three Henry VI plays, Richard III, and Titus Andronicus.
37
“Hieronimo is mad againe.” Christianized Stoicism, sometimes called Neostoicism, was
popular in the social circles of the Earls of Essex and Southampton, with whom
Shakespeare had close connections. Two of Shakespeare’s source texts, Samuel Daniel’s
The Civil Wars and Marlowe’s Edward II, both concerned with failed kings, draw on
Stoicism in their own ways. The chronicle history of Richard II’s reign, from which
Shakespeare’s drew significantly, offers the story of a king that becomes a subject.2 Such
a tale asks for the treatment of Stoicism, the philosophy for the disempowered.
In this context, it hardly comes as a surprise that in Richard II’s deposition scene,
a powerfully dramatic spectacle of disempowerment, Shakespeare’s soon-to-be ex-king
obsessively repeats a word with deeply Stoic resonance: “myself.” Only once in the
play’s first three acts did Richard use this word, and he will utter it just twice more after
his abdication. But in the midst of his deposition, he says it seven times in seventy-five
lines.3 Pressed by Bolingbroke to resign, Richard famously replies:
Ay, no. No, ay; for I must nothing be.
Therefore, no ‘no’, for I resign to thee.
Now mark me how I will undo myself. (4.1.201-3)
The speech’s wordplay has received much comment. Richard, we are told, plays on the
homophone of “Ay” and “I” to express the annihilating impact of abdication: “I know no
‘I.’” The lines represent, as Ernst Kantorowicz’s highly influential reading puts it, “the
demise of Richard and the rise of a new body natural.” We see the king “break apart” as
2 See Jeremy Lopez, “Eating Richard II,” Shakespeare Studies 36 (2008): 207-28.
3 3.2.83; 4.1.203, 238, 247, 248, 259, 262, 275; 5.5.4, 33. References come from King Richard II,
ed. Charles Forker (Arden, 2002). Interjections in square brackets come from the First Folio text.
38
the royal “we” slips away along with Richard’s unified identity.4 But it is not the body
natural’s “I” that Richard suddenly repeats here; he has used “I” since the opening scene.
Instead, he repeats “myself,” a word—really a phrase—whose peculiar linguistic and
textual condition makes it more significant than “I” for the question of subjectivity and
calls into question the orthodox belief that deposition “break[s] apart” Richard’s identity.
“Myself” counts as a phrase because in Shakespeare’s time most reflexive
pronouns (also known as emphatic pronouns) appeared as not one but two words. The
First Folio prints Richard’s lines this way:
Figure 1: Excerpt from the First Folio, Sig. d2v
The difference between “myself” and “my selfe” has largely been taken as an
“accidental” textual feature, but the fact that the “self” can be considered distinct from
what possesses it only begins to describe the reflexive pronouns’ potential significance,
especially as Shakespeare exploits that potential in Richard II.5 Both two words and one,
“my self” combines grammatical reflexivity (by which Richard undoes himself) and
4 Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, Princeton
Paperbacks (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997), 40, 31. Hugh Grady’s recent account of the play, in
Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2002), 58-108, typifies the Kantorowiczean line. Grady groups himself with these “disunifiers”
who see Richard on a trajectory from unity to fragmentedness (94n68).
5 The technical, problematic term “accidentals” originates with W. W. Greg, “The Rationale of
Copy-Text,” in Collected Papers, ed., J. C. Maxwell (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1966), 374-91. See also Jerome
J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1992), 23-36.
39
literal “self”-possession (by which he undoes his self). Even as it functions reflexively
and emphatically, the pronoun features a verbal “self” possessed grammatically by the
personal pronoun “my.” This peculiar morphology provides a means to speak as if one
possesses one’s self. Given the deposition scene’s centuries-old status as a flashpoint of
debate over sovereignty and selfhood, the reflexive pronoun’s unique grammatical
situation—pointing, as it does, to the highly fraught question of subjectivity—should call
our attention to Richard’s sudden repetition of “my self,” and more broadly to the way
Shakespeare uses reflexives throughout the play. Simply put, if deposition is the
“demise” of Richard’s identity, then why would Shakespeare bring into play, at the very
moment of abdication, a term that emphasizes Stoic self-possession?
This chapter argues that Richard II’s dynamics of subjectivity, which have long
occupied critics, take place first and foremost at the stylistic level. Shakespeare exploits
the peculiar value of the reflexive pronouns to give speakers a language of selfhood.
Reflexive speech gathers the parts of oneself into an imaginative hypostatic whole and in
doing so cuts across the Kantorowiczean tradition of reading the play as Richard’s
painful journey from unity to fragmentedness.6 If Richard’s pre-deposition habit of
speaking is an affirmation of a unified identity, it is a continually modulating one that
convinces no one, including Richard himself. The king tries to articulate a sense of self
6 David Norbrook (“The Emperor’s New Body? Richard II, Ernst Kantorowicz, and the Politics of
Shakespeare Criticism,” Textual Practice 10, no. 2 [Summer 1996]) has observed that “critics who have
drawn heavily on Kantorowicz have…inherited a set of assumptions” (342), the most predominant of
which is that “Richard is a ‘unified’ figure in the first part of the play” (348). See also the recent issue of
Representations commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of The King’s Two Bodies. See especially Richard
Halpern, “The King’s Two Buckets: Kantorowicz, Richard II, and Fiscal Trauerspiel,” Representations 106
(2009): 67-76; and Lorna Hutson, “Imagining Justice: Kantorowicz and Shakespeare,” Representations 106
(2009): 118-42.
40
by speaking reflexively about himself, but he cannot. He strives unsuccessfully and
desperately for a means of self-reference, having recourse to shifting terminologies of
divine right that heighten his desperation. Only when Richard deposes himself, and in
doing so completes his first sustained reflexive speech act, does he begin to speak with a
sense of unified selfhood.
It seems counterintuitive to see, as Harry Berger’s infamous reading of the play
does, Richard’s apparent weakness as a performance of weakness that therefore indicates
his strength. It seems similarly counterintuitive to see Richard’s supposed loss or
fragmentation of self as the product of an imaginatively unified selfhood. But that is
exactly what Shakespeare does in and through Stoically charged reflexive language: he
turns what promises to be a representational loss—which Senecan tragedy always is—
and makes it a representational gain. Shakespeare draws on and intervenes in the Stoic
philosophical and Senecan theatrical traditions, which feature heavy use of reflexive
language. Along these lines, Gordon Braden observes that “Stoicism and Senecan drama,
without being inaccessible to each other, generally run on separate tracks.”7 This
productive tension between Stoic constancy and Senecan fury, both based on a self-ruled,
unified subjectivity, offered Shakespeare the chance to write a new drama of the self for
the literary market. One need neither disavow nor ratify the existence of an autonomous,
pre-linguistic self to see that the language of reflexive personhood gives Richard the
7 Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger’s Privilege (New
Haven: Yale UP, 1985), 70.
41
means to speak as if he were autonomous.8 This chapter shows how Shakespeare
appropriates that language from the literary marketplace and inflates its value.
Kings Fall Apart
The value of “my self” to Shakespeare derives largely from the space between
“my” and “self.” The “self”-marked pronouns eventually allow Richard to speak as if he
had a unified self without sacrificing the ability to speak as if that self were made up of
separate parts. In other words, to speak “my self” is for Richard to master the ambiguity
between unity and fragmentedness. Both of these attributes are the products of the
reflexive pronouns’ grammatical and textual structure. When Shakespeare was writing
Richard II, the pronouns existed in a state of grammatical flux that historical linguists call
“grammaticalization,” the process of changing from content words to function words
such as “myself” as we use it today.9 “Myself” began in Old English as the pronoun “me”
combined with the emphatic adjective “self,” yet only in the fifteenth and sixteenth
8 On the highly vexed relationship between language and identity, see Jacob Burckhardt, The
Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, (1860; London: Penguin, 1990), esp. 143-74; Stephen Greenblatt,
Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984), esp. 11-73;
Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London:
Methuen, 1985); Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1989), 111-76; Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995), 1-34; Richard Hillman, Self-Speaking in Medieval and Early Modern
English Drama: Subjectivity, Discourse, and the Stage (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); and Jerrold
E. Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), esp. 3-83.
9 See Elly Van Gelderen, A History of English Reflexive Pronouns: Person, Self, and
Interpretability (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000). See also Penelope Freedman, Power and Passion in
Shakespeare’s Pronouns: Interrogating ‘you’ and ‘thou’ (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 1-20, 189-258.
42
centuries did the two words become the compound “my self.”10 This change eventually
meant printing the pronouns as one word rather than two, but not until the late 1600s.11
As grammaticalization proceeded, two important events occurred. First, the “self”
pronouns, which have been used for emphasis throughout the history of English, became
the predominant markers of grammatical reflexivity.12 Second, as a result of this process
(though not a part of grammaticalization), the word “self” became a noun.13 In
Shakespeare’s time, therefore, one could use reflexive pronouns in three ways:
emphatically, as in “I will myself [my selfe] into the pulpit first”; reflexively, as in “The
offense pardons itself”; and as a noun phrase, often leading to a third person verb
conjugation, as in “Myself [My selfe] hath often heard them say.”14
This linguistic review shows us the rhetorical, personal complexity of the
reflexive pronouns, “my self” in particular. They create an ambiguity between one and
two, single and multiple, unity and plurality. Used reflexively and emphatically, “my
self” is two words treated grammatically as one. Used substantively, “my self” counts as
two words, a possessive pronoun and a noun. “My self” used in this way creates a verbal
process of self-possession by indicating that there is a self possessed by the “me” in the
10 OED s.v. “myself.”
11 In Shakespeare’s time, “himself” and “themselves” were already being printed as one word,
because they grammaticalized much more easily than other “self” pronouns. See OED s.v. “himself” and
“themselves.”
12 Van Gelderen, A History, 25. Kirsti Pietsara calculates that between 1420 and 1500, 72% of
reflexive constructions used the simple pronoun (e.g., “me”), and after 1500 “the ‘self’-marked reflexive
became predominant,” quoted in Van Gelderen, A History, 111.
13 OED s.v. “self.” Most of OED’s entries for the reflexive pronouns play up the extent to which
“self” would never have become a noun were it not for the slow and steady grammaticalization of the
compound reflexives.
14 Julius Caesar 3.1.236; Measure for Measure 5.1.534; Titus Andronicus 4.4.74. Citations from
The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
43
accompanying pronoun.15 Outside of any particular context, therefore, “my self” is
ambiguous, because two oppositional notions, unity and disunity—identity and nonidentity—occur in the same signifier. Moreover, once we begin to analyze specific
instances, both notions remain implicit, even when one or the other is predominant.
Indeed, most reflexive and emphatic instances, which promote unity, are susceptible to
being analyzed as substantive instances, which promote fragmentation. Even when I use
“my self” in a purely reflexive way (and doing so is harder than we might imagine), I can
do so only by suppressing the substantive use and the doubleness for which it stands. And
even when I do so, I am still taking advantage, not grammatically but stylistically and
personally, of the self-possession implicit in the substantive use. To say, for example, “I
dress my self” is to claim, implicitly in the very structure of my words, that I possess a
self separate from “me.” Yet this reflexive use pulls the separate parts back together into
a sense of unity: I “dress my self,” but I also “dress myself.” To speak “my self” is to
confront, though not necessarily to resolve, the ambiguity between the whole and its
parts. What makes this fascinating feature of English important here is that Shakespeare
exploits it to intervene in the literary market for the Stoic self. In Richard II, speaking
“my self” amounts to a capacity for self-reference that Richard achieves in the verbal act
of self-deposition.
One might object that the subjectivity described thus far treats the self as if it were
not connected inexorably to the rhetorical circumstances of specific utterances. One
15 OED s.v. “self,” C.I.4.b. Early modern grammar manuals confirm this notion of a two-into-one
compound. They describe the reflexive pronouns as amalgamated forms and use the terms “compound” and
“composition.” See Ute Dons, Descriptive Adequacy of Early Modern English Grammars, Topics in
English Linguistics 47 (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004), 79.
44
might, that is, argue that words alone cannot generate a sense of self because subjectivity
entails speech in particular situations. While the interpersonal, political, and dramatic
contexts in which speakers in Richard II use reflexive pronouns cannot be discounted,
“my self” specifically rejects the ordinary rules of “I,” the usual focus in critical
discussions of subjectivity. In a seminal essay on the topic, Émile Benveniste writes that
“it is in and through language that man constitutes himself as a subject.”16 This statement
applies nicely to the subjectivity created by “my self,” but Benveniste goes on to argue
that the subjectivity of “I” is a product not just of language but of discourse between “I”
and “you.” Thus, he concludes, “it is in a dialectic reality that will incorporate the two
terms [“I” and “the other”] and define them by mutual relationship that the linguistic
basis of subjectivity is discovered.” “I” creates personhood because it is situated in a
polarity with “the other.” In this scheme, there is no de-situated subjectivity of the sort
promised by Stoic philosophy. By stark contrast, the power of “my self” is that it
imagines and indicates just such de-situated selfhood. Whereas “I” is mutually defined by
“you,” the reflexive pronoun’s subject is self-defining. It is, in other words, personally as
well as grammatically reflexive. Just as it allows one to speak as if with a unified self,
“my self” also allows one to speak as if that self were only a function of itself and not of
16 Émile Benveniste, “Subjectivity in Language,” in Critical Theory Since 1965, ed. Hazard
Adams and Leroy Searle (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1986), 729. Sylvia Adamson has
recently argued that in early modern English (and early modern English drama), identity construction takes
place in the crucible of dialogue. See “Questions of Identity in Renaissance Drama: New Historicism Meets
Old Philology,” Shakespeare Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 56-77.
45
discourse. The selfhood it announces is autarchic—literally, self-ruled.17 To speak “my
self” is to refer to a self de-situated rhetorically from the context of its utterance.
Even if the “self”-marked pronouns do not create a unified ontology by
themselves, therefore, they conjure the impression of one, and this quality makes them
powerful representational tools in Shakespeare’s hands as he dramatizes the chiasmus of
Richard’s fall and Bolingbroke’s rise.18 During his rise to power, the usurper Bolingbroke
demonstrates strong self-possession and uses it to persuade others as he takes action. At
the same time, Richard cannot speak the parts of himself into a unity, as “my self” would
allow him to do. In the play’s opening scene, despite the king’s would-be authoritative
claim that “We were not born to sue but to command” (1.1.196), Richard does much
more suing than commanding. As the dukes enter, he remarks on how “High-stomached
are they both and full of ire, / In rage, deaf as the sea, hasty as fire” (18-19). The
unexpected couplet registers the apprehension and even envy with which Richard views
the dukes’ anger, but not before he declares his intent that “Face to face, / And frowning
brow to brow, ourselves [our selues] will hear / The accuser and the accused freely
speak” (15-17). An approach assuming kingly unity would read the royal plural “our
selues” as an “indication of a linguistic unity or integrity of character so deep as
practically to be different in kind.”19 Yet to seek singularity within a word popularized in
17 See Braden, Anger’s Privilege, 63-98.
18 On Shakespeare’s use of other such keywords, see William Empson, The Structure of Complex
Words (London: Chatto & Windus, 1951) and C. S. Lewis, Studies in Words (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1961).
19 Joseph Ashby Porter, The Drama of Speech Acts: Shakespeare’s Lancastrian Tetralogy
(Berkeley: U of California P, 1979), 27.
46
the sixteenth century out of the need for a plural is to look past Shakespeare’s language.
When “self” became a noun, the plural “our” did not fit with the singular “self,” and a
vacuum opened for an unambiguous plural with which to treat the two parts as if they
were aspects of the same entity, “we.”20 The kingly self-unity for which “ourselves”
supposedly stands thus conflicts with the word’s plurality, both its grammatical number
and its plural textual state.
Never again in the opening scene does Shakespeare give Richard a “self”-marked
pronoun, and he oscillates throughout between the singular and the plural, as when he
invites Mowbray to speak freely:
Mowbray, impartial are our eyes and ears.
Were he my brother, nay, my kingdom’s heir,
As he is but my father’s brother’s son,
Now, by my sceptre’s awe, I make a vow
Such neighbour nearness to our sacred blood
Should nothing privilege him nor partialize
The unstooping firmness of my upright soul.
He is our subject, Mowbray; so art thou.
Free speech and fearless I to thee allow. (115-23, emphasis mine)
Considering that “my kingdom’s” reads “our kingdomes” in the Folio, and that only the
Folio includes the “my” in “my sceptre’s,” the play’s original editors seem to have been
confused about which pronouns Richard speaks. Charles Forker suggests that
20 OED s.vv. “ourselves,” “ourself.”
47
“Shakespeare may have intended an occasional reversion to the more personal [i.e.,
pronoun] form as a means of suggesting the private Richard behind his public façade,”
but so rigid a scheme of external versus internal is unnecessary, even if Richard wants
Mowbray to keep his mouth shut about the king’s responsibility for Woodstock’s death
(116n). Indeed, Richard “partialize[s],” or acts with bias, against Mowbray, and lacks
“firmness,” not least because he shoplifts from the unyielding combatants the idea of a
firm soul. Both men refuse to budge, equating their strong speech with strong actions.
Bolingbroke promises, “what I speak / My body shall make good upon this earth”
(1.1.36-37) and “look what I speak, my life shall prove it true” (87). Faced with the
dukes’ appeal to wholeness, Richard wobbles between a singular and a plural subject
position. He cannot manage the ambiguity verbally.
The problem only worsens as Shakespeare closely correlates Richard’s moments
of struggle with the dukes’ most self-possessed statements. When Mowbray calls
Bolingbroke a traitor, his forcefulness arises grammatically and rhetorically from his
reflexive language: “in myself [my selfe] I boldly will defend … to prove myself [my
selfe] a loyal gentleman” (145, 148). Ambiguously reflexive and substantive, Mowbray’s
use of “my self” cues the actor playing him to gesture to himself as he speaks. Richard’s
response, “Wrath-kindled gentlemen, be ruled by me,” accepts Mowbray’s reflexive
boldness as proof of his gentle status. Instead of saying “I rule you,” he passively
requests that they “be ruled by” him. However much he pleads, though, the dukes remain
constant in anger. Mowbray turns Richard’s line “Norfolk, throw down, we bid; there is
no boot” into a reflexive gesture, kneeling as he turns the line back at the king: “Myself
48
[My selfe] I throw, dread sovereign, at thy foot” (164-65). That he can throw himself—or
his self—anywhere is a powerfully self-presenting act. That he throws that self at the
king has the force of a taunt. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Shakespeare ends the scene with
Richard allowing the men to fight, exactly what he wanted to avoid. In doing so,
Shakespeare demonstrates that Mowbray and Bolingbroke do something Richard lacks:
they have spoken persuasively about themselves.
In stark contrast to Richard, Bolingbroke speaks with and acts upon a wholeness
constituted in the “self”-marked pronouns. He uses “my self” repeatedly before becoming
king, several times as a substitute for “I” and always as a way of affirming his sense of
self. In the moments leading up to the duel, he claims, “Mowbray and myself [my selfe]
are like two men / That vow a long and weary pilgrimage” (1.3.48-49). Before Flint
castle, he proposes that “King Richard and myself [my selfe] should meet” (3.3.54). Both
moments end with Bolingbroke somehow getting the best of his interlocutors. Similarly,
in the same way that the reflexive pronoun construed as a noun phrase moves outward
from possessor (my) to possessed (self), only to turn grammatically back toward the
possessor, so too does Bolingbroke go out in banishment and return, and from this selfpossessive act derives the force of his claim. Green reports to the Queen that “the
banished Bolingbroke repeals himself,” and the Queen’s despairing reply, “Now God in
heaven forbid!” responds as much to the reflexive manner of his return as it does to his
return itself (2.2.49). He has not simply “come back”; he has repealed himself, an act in
which the subject and the object come together in one person. When he reappears,
Bolingbroke confirms the Queen’s fear. He thanks Henry Percy by diplomatically saying
49
“I count myself [my selfe] in nothing else so happy / As in a soul rememb’ring my good
friends” (2.3.46-47). The future Henry IV avoids excluding sources of happiness beyond
good friends, and instead evaluates these elements—friends and other sources of
happiness—based upon his ability to “count my selfe.” Personal reflexivity determines
the value and tone of his campaign. Thus when York enters and accuses him of treason,
Bolingbroke makes a rhetorically powerful response: “As I was banished, I was banished
Hereford; / But as I come, I come for Lancaster” (113-14). In the pair of half-lines, “I am
a subject, / And I challenge law,” the first articulates his status as derivative of the law,
and the second turns back against that same law. Bolingbroke’s challenge sways York
because of his powerful self-speech, especially his ability to coordinate the aspects of his
person into a single project.
In Bolingbroke’s accusation of Bushy and Green, Shakespeare confirms the
relationship between bold, successful action and a reflexive sense of self. The duke
defines himself even as he provides evidence against the two men:
Myself [My selfe], a prince by fortune of my birth,
Near to the king in blood and near in love
Till you did make him misinterpret me,
Have stooped my neck under your injuries
And sighed my English breath in foreign clouds,
Eating the bitter bread of banishment
Whilst you have fed upon my signories,
Disparked my parks and felled my forest woods,
50
From my own windows torn my household coat,
Razed out my imprese, leaving me no sign
Save men’s opinions and my living blood
To show the world I am a gentleman. (3.1.16-27)
In a brilliant arc, the speech moves from the self-possession implicit in “my self,” which
here acts as the subject of the suspended sentence, through an emphasis on “blood” and
the manipulation of opinion, out to “foreign clouds.” Then, the two men having
dispossessed Bolingbroke materially, the speech turns back along the same path, through
“opinions” and “blood,” and ends with a simple statement of identity: “I am a
gentleman.” The lines produce a sense of wholeness, however fictional. He accuses
Bushy and Green based on his own self-speech, which arises grammatically from the
pronoun/noun “my self.”
We cannot say the same for Richard as king, whom Shakespeare persistently
refuses to integrate. Characters who speak reflexively about themselves—Gaunt, York,
Northumberland, and finally Bolingbroke—contrast with Richard, whose struggle to selfspeak produces his willingness, perhaps desire, to depose himself. While Berger’s claim
that Richard is the mastermind of Bolingbroke’s usurpation may seem dubious in the
light of the king’s failures to self-speak, Berger is right that “whatever we impute to
Richard at either the intentional or the motivational level, his actions as well as his
language dare Bolingbroke to assume the usurper's role.”21 Turning his attention to
21 Harry Berger, Imaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page (Berkeley: U of California
P, 1989), 55.
51
Ireland, the king proclaims “We will ourself [our selfe] in person to this war” (1.4.42),
and the plural “we” and “our” jars against the singularity of “self.” He again renders
passively what ought to be a decisive act: “We are enforced to farm our royal realm”
(45). Bolingbroke’s “my self” works to identify the agent of his actions, but Richard is
“enforced” rather than enforcing. Similarly, while Gaunt’s famous “sceptred isle” speech
(2.1.31-68) is based upon a self-possessed prophetic ethos, his dialogue with Richard
shows the extent to which reflexive speech taunts Richard. He plays on his own name
even as he wittily accuses Richard of being “landlord of England” but “not king” (113).
By having the duke claim that his “misery makes sport to mock itself” (85), Shakespeare
highlights Richard’s contrasting inability to mock himself. Richard responds angrily and
unplayfully to Gaunt. When the duke, still speaking reflexively, says Richard is
“possessed now to depose thyself [thy selfe],” he promises that the only reflexive act
available to Richard is self-deposition.
Forker rightly connects Richard’s “plangent clinging to his rank” with the king’s
sense of self. But in treating language as mere evidence for the actual self, Forker
overlooks the possibility that the king’s “plangent clinging” constitutes in language
Richard’s failure at self-description, the failure of one who has never convincingly
described himself.22 In the remarkable homecoming scene (3.2), Shakespeare shows
Richard’s several unsuccessful but illuminating attempts at articulating the parts of
himself as a unified whole. For example, the king enunciates a form of divine right
22 Charles Forker, “Unstable Identity in Shakespeare’s Richard II,” Renascence: Essays on
Values in Literature 54, no. 1 (Fall 2001): 9.
52
theology, often cited by critics: “The breath of worldly men cannot depose / The deputy
elected by the Lord” (56-57). Again, Berger is only half-right to see these claims as
“blatant experiments in self-representation.”23 They are, more precisely, failed attempts at
self-representation. The king has recourse to the language of a divinely granted stature,
but he also refers to Gaunt’s claim that self-deposition is Richard’s only reflexive option.
The king is “possessed now to depose [him]self” (2.1.108). Richard describes the rebels
as “trembling at themselves” (3.2.46) and “self-affrighted” (53), speaking of them
reflexively as he cannot speak of himself. When more bad news arrives and Aumerle asks
why Richard looks pale, the king responds that “the blood of twenty thousand men / Did
triumph in my face, and they are fled” (76-77). The possibility of oneness disperses into
multiples.
Only in forgetting his status as king does Richard manage to speak reflexively.
Aumerle comforts the king—“Remember who you are” (82)—and Shakespeare
introduces Richard’s only pre-deposition-scene use of “myself”: “I had forgot myself [my
selfe]” (83). Richard plays so effectively on the pronoun’s ambiguity, reflexively
forgetting himself and forgetting his substantive self, that the two prove indistinguishable
yet nevertheless distinct, like Joseph Jastrow’s figure of a duck that is a rabbit at the very
same time.24 He thinks and speaks for the briefest moment like a subject in both senses of
the word, but the insight flashes and disappears as he remembers his majesty, name, and
23 Berger, Imaginary Audition, 105.
24 See David Schalkwyk, Literature and the Touch of the Real (Newark: U of Delaware P, 2004),
153-59. Schalkwyk writes, in what might be a description of the king’s situation, that it is “impossible to
have certain kinds of experience without particular kinds of linguistic competence” and that “meaning and
understanding are akin to abilities: they involve the mastery of certain techniques rather than ideas in the
mind or the mental products of an abstract linguistic system” (156-57).
53
“great glory.” The fiction of oneness collapses when his claims to the status of king pull
him apart once more. As with his recourse to divine right, the brief unity “my self” gave
him disperses into “twenty thousand” (85), but not without suggesting again the
incompatibility between self-possession and sovereignty. When Scroop lays on a barrage
of noun phrases made up of possessive pronoun and object—“thy majesty,” “thy crown,”
“thy state,” “thy seat” (113-19)—Richard answers that “nothing can we call our own but
death,” a grim acceptance of the king’s inability to possess himself (152). Death, he goes
on, “infus[es]” the king “with self and vain conceit” (166). This line is key: Forker says
“self is adjectival [and] syntactically parallel to vain” (166n), and thus without “vain” the
line would read “infusing him with self-conceit.” But “self” also works substantively and
stands as a noun beside “vain conceit.” Richard registers that the kingly self to which he
has continually had recourse derives from death, and he anticipates deposition as a result:
“Subjected thus, / How can you say to me I am a king?” (176-77). Kantorowicz’s
reading, along with others that follow his lead, assumes Richard wants to be king and
only unwillingly gives up the crown, but the lack of reflexive self-speaking that attends
upon kingship instead produces a desire—in early modern idiom, a will—not to be
king.25 He wants the oneness that subjects demonstrate when they speak reflexively,
exactly what his kingship prevents him from maintaining. Accordingly, the next scene
ends with Richard saying to Bolingbroke, “What you will have, I’ll give, and willing too”
25 OED, s.v. “will n.1,” I.1.a: “Desire, wish, longing; liking, inclination, disposition (to do
something).”
54
(3.3.206, my emphasis). At last, he gets what he seems to want: the chance to depose
himself.
Majesty a Subject
In speaking his first “my self” of the deposition scene, Richard discovers
something new not so much from the shambles of a fragmented identity as from talking
about himself. As the king hands over the crown, Shakespeare stages a profound stylistic
breakthrough:
Ay, no. No, ay; for I must nothing be.
Therefore, no ‘no’, for I resign to thee.
Now mark me how I will undo myself [my selfe]. (4.1.201-3)
The speech’s reflexive form shows us something more complex than a “disoriented
psychic state” (201n). Richard’s “Ay, no. No, ay” moves outward (the first “Ay”) and
back, reflexively inward (“no. No”), before the final outward-moving assent (“ay”).
Moreover, his ensuing speech proves anything but disoriented. It is dramatic, even
volatile, but it is also just as deliberately self-possessed as Bolingbroke’s earlier
accusation of Bushy and Green. The flash of nihilism disappears as Richard recuperates a
stylistic means for self-reference. His “my self” here works as part of the reflexive verb,
“to undo oneself,” and as its substantive object. He speaks the imperative (and also
reflexive) “mark me” with an authority he lacked when doling out sentences of exile in
Act 1, and the line’s perfectly iambic rhythm bespeaks stability rather than turbulence.
55
Richard’s self-undoing entails a powerful stylistic self-possession, and possession is the
very topic he takes up as he gives up the crown:
I give this heavy weight from off my head,
And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand.
The pride of kingly sway from out my heart;
With mine own tears I wash away my balm,
With mine own hands I give away my crown,
With mine own tongue deny my sacred state,
And with mine own breath release all duteous oaths. (204-10, SDs omitted)
This speech act, long recognized as an inverted coronation rite, takes back what had been
posited. In undoing himself, Richard speaks for the first time as if he owns what he gives
away.
Each of Richard’s lengthy responses to Bolingbroke and Northumberland
contains one or more instances of “my self,” around which the speech is structured
stylistically and rhetorically. Richard’s celebrated verbal puissance in the scene flies in
the face of arguments that would completely “disunify” him. What he previously
lacked—the ability to talk simultaneously about his self and himself—he now attains, and
he takes noticeable relish in doing so. To be sure, Shakespeare’s deft use of “my self”
gives every speech in the scene its dramatic power, whether performed on stage or read
on page. Denying Northumberland’s third attempt to make him read the articles of
deposition, Richard again turns the sun imagery back on Bolingbroke:
Alack the heavy day,
56
That I have worn so many winters out
And know not now what name to call myself [my selfe].
O, that I were a mockery king of snow,
Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke,
To melt myself [my selfe] away in water-drops! (257-62)
Hugh Grady claims that Richard here “laments his loss of identity.”26 Insofar as Richard
has lost his status as king and truly does not know what name to call himself, Grady’s
point obtains. Richard has lost something; he does lament that loss. But through his loss
of kingship, Richard has also mastered the ability to call himself something at all, and in
that fact he takes pleasure as well as sorrow, dominating the scene with a virtuoso display
of verse equivalent to Falstaff’s great prose scenes. He revels, in both senses of the word,
in self-speech. Furthermore, as we have seen, in Acts 1-3 Richard strives but fails to call
himself anything because he cannot speak about himself. Here he does that very thing,
when the syntax of his speech subtly undercuts the metaphor’s implication. The “sun of
Bolingbroke” would seem to do the melting, but “melt myself away” makes Richard the
agent of a self-referential action. The linguist’s terminology fits this situation perfectly:
whereas Richard as king continually sought for a content word to describe himself
(3.2.86: “Arm, arm, my name!”), he now discovers a function word, “my self,” and in it
the content word he was looking for, “self.” Richard grammaticalizes from king to
subject. Just as others once taunted him with reflexive speech, Richard taunts
Bolingbroke, so that the soon-to-be king does whatever the now ex-king wants, including
26 Grady, Shakespeare, 94.
57
fetch a mirror so Richard’s self-display can continue. He is not so much “unfixed” as
Stoically self-fixed.
In the same way that Bolingbroke accuses Bushy and Green even as he commits
verbal self-possession (3.1.16-27), Shakespeare bases Richard’s vitriol against
Northumberland and Bolingbroke on a reflexive sense of self. As if the audience were not
already captivated, Richard calls further attention to himself:
Nay, all of you that stand and look upon me,
Whilst that my wretchedness doth bait myself [my selfe],
Though some of you, with Pilate, wash your hands,
Showing an outward pity, yet you Pilates
Have here delivered me to my sour cross,
And water cannot wash away your sin. (237-42)
The whole movement of these lines hinges on Richard’s “bait myself,” which, as Barbara
Mowat and Paul Werstine note, alludes to bear baiting and suggests that “here the
spectators watch Richard being attacked by his own wretchedness.”27 That image of selfdisplay produces the similarly spectacular Christ comparison, which suspends the
sentence still further and leaves “all of you” temporarily without a verb. Only when the
accusation extends from “some” of the Pilate-like onlookers to everyone (“you Pilates”)
does the all-inclusive verb “have … delivered” appear and complete the indictment.
These complicated lines spring from “my self,” and the two images Shakespeare conjures
27 William Shakespeare, Richard II, ed. Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine (Washington DC:
Washington Square Press, 2005), 166.
58
with them emanate from the unity out of which Richard speaks. “My self” so excites him
that he moves from one image of painful self-display to another, and from that reflexive
display comes the speech’s punch. When Northumberland tries again to make Richard
read the articles (243), the response centers once more on “my self”:
Nay, if I turn my eyes upon myself [my selfe],
I find myself [my selfe] a traitor with the rest;
For I have given here my soul’s consent
T’undeck the pompous body of a king,
Made Glory base and Sovereignty a slave,
Proud Majesty a subject, State a peasant. (247-52)
Whereas Shakespeare collapsed Richard’s statements about kingship in Acts 1-3 as soon
as he spoke them, this speech’s rhetorical flare derives from Richard’s ability to turn his
eyes upon himself and find something—his self—there. Reflexivity precedes Richard’s
statements about kingship; an act of self-speech brings about the celebrated exposé of
sovereignty.28 If we ignore the coherent sense of self that speaking “myself” gives
Richard, then we mistake his unifiable self, fashioned reflexively in language, for a
disunified self beyond words.
Although Kantorowicz states roundly that “the image of the twinned nature of a
king … was most genuinely Shakespeare’s own and proper vision,” he neglects, as
Anselm Haverkamp puts it, the “dialectic” that “threatens to break up the ontological
28 See David Scott Kastan, “Proud Majesty Made a Subject: Shakespeare and the Spectacle of
Rule,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37, no. 4 (Winter 1986): 459-75.
59
oneness by playing off the two natures against each other.”29 Kantorowicz overlooks, in
other words, the fact that Richard cannot achieve a kind of hypostasis as king because the
parts that compose his kingly identity create imbalance rather than stability. As I have
argued, Richard’s inability to speak reflexively inhabits that kingly lack of unity—until
the deposition, when the Richard/Bolingbroke chiasmus finally reaches the crossing point
and Richard moves from in-power to out-of-power while Bolingbroke does the reverse.
Following Kantorowicz, Grady reacts against readings of the play that assume “that
Richard, because of the nature of his true inner self, is unfit for royal vocation.”30 He
rejects the idea that Richard might possess the kind of singular, unified, coherent, and
purely rational self that grew up in the Enlightenment; he claims instead that Richard
anticipates a distinctly modern theory of subjectivity. This “unfixed” identity, which
Grady labels “Montaignean,” allows for the individual’s resistance to power structures.31
While his reading has Richard achieve in deposition a model of subjectivity for those out
of power, Grady too sharply opposes the Montaignean theory of the self to the
Enlightenment theory, which was the basis for arguments about Richard’s “true inner
self.”32 The problem with Grady’s opposition is that the Enlightenment self he argues
against and the “unfixed” self he argues for share a common philosophical base, one that
29 Kantorowicz, 25; Anselm Haverkamp, “Richard II, Bracton, and the End of Political
Theology,” Law and Literature 16, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 320.
30 Grady, Shakespeare, 93.
31 Ibid., 94-103.
32 For a subtle treatment of the complex Montaigne-Shakespeare connection, see Lars Engle,
“Sovereign Cruelty in Montaigne and King Lear,” in Shakespearean International Yearbook, ed. Graham
Bradshaw, Thomas Bishop, and Peter Holbrook (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2006), 6: 119-39.
60
connects reflexive subjectivity, reflexive language, 1590s literary culture, and Richard II:
Stoicism.
In late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe, Stoicism enjoyed vogue
status as a philosophical and literary system built on the idea of a unified, reflexive self
whose chief ethical principle is constancy.33 “The wise man,” Seneca writes in his epistle
on friendship, “does such things as this: he is hidden in himself, is with himself.”34
Seneca’s reflexive language, a defining aspect of Stoic writings, may seem initially to
militate against the idea of a unified self. Entity A, which does the hiding, seems distinct
from Entity B, in which Entity A hides. But Seneca’s whole point, in this epistle and in
his ethics generally, is that the very reflexive act of hiding in oneself compounds Entities
A and B. Gretchen Reydams-Schils has observed that “we encounter the Roman Stoic
self in innumerable passages that contain reflexive language,” because that language, as
we have seen, provides a verbal means of self-reference.35 Such potential invests in
reflexive language great representational capacity, which the ambiguity of the English
“self” pronouns enhances. In Shakespeare’s time, Stoicism provided writers with a way
of thinking about the self especially suited to those out of power. Thinkers as
33 See Gilles D. Monsarrat, Light from the Porch: Stoicism and English Renaissance Literature,
Collection Etudes Anglaises 86 (Paris: Didier-Erudition, 1984); and J. H. M. Salmon, “Seneca and Tacitus
in Jacobean England,” in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1991), 169-88. On constancy, see Jason Lewis Saunders, Justus Lipsius: the Philosophy of
Renaissance Stoicism (New York: Liberal Arts P, 1955); Geoffrey Miles, Shakespeare and the Constant
Romans, Oxford English Monographs (London: Clarendon, 1996); Adriana Alice Norma McCrea,
Constant Minds: Political Virtue and the Lipsian Paradigm in England, 1584-1650, The Mental and
Cultural World of Tudor and Stuart England (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1997).
34 Epistle 9.16: “Tale quiddam sapiens facit: in se reconditur, se cum est” (my trans.), in Seneca,
Epistles, trans. Richard M. Gummere, Loeb Classical Library 75 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1917), 52.
35 Gretchen Reydams-Schils, The Roman Stoics: Self, Responsibility, and Affection (Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 2005), 25.
61
ideologically diverse as Justus Lipsius, the “English Seneca” Joseph Hall, and Montaigne
found in Stoicism not just a style of self but a stylistic self. Unsurprisingly, therefore,
writers close to this Stoic revival make heavy use of reflexive language—the language of
self-reference.36 For example, Samuel Daniel’s The Civil Wars, probably one of
Shakespeare’s sources for Richard II, reflects its author’s Stoic understanding of the self
and features frequent use of reflexive language.37
If some Stoicism-influenced texts privileged constancy as the main quality of the
unified self, Senecan tragedy of the 1580s and 1590s privileged anger. Indeed, furor and
constantia make up the two sides of the Stoic coin, both based on the reflexive self.
Gordon Braden describes how the “central focus in what Stoic writings we have intact,”
and in the early modern texts that belong to the Stoic tradition, is “a commitment to the
self’s superiority to all public ambitions and intimidations.”38 As a result, Senecan drama
often features disempowered subjects taking angry action against those with political
power. Plays such as Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, The
36 Two important Stoic texts serve as additional examples: the English translation of Plutarch, one
of Shakespeare’s stand-by sources, and Lipsius’s On Constancy, published in English in 1595, right when
Shakespeare was writing Richard II. Both texts feature a prominent use of reflexive language, often in the
third person. Neither, however, makes the same play on “my self” that Shakespeare does in Richard II. See
Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, ed. Roland Orvil Baughman, trans. Thomas North
and Simon Goulart (1579; New York: The Heritage Press, 1941); and Justus Lipsius, On Constancy, ed.
John Sellars, trans. John Stradling (1595; Exeter: Bristol Phoenix Press, 2006).
37 See Samuel Daniel, The first fowre bookes of the ciuile warres betweene the two houses of
Lancaster and Yorke, (London: P. Short, 1595); and John Pitcher, “Daniel, Samuel (1562/3-1619),” in
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004),
http://www.oxforddnb.com.
38 Braden, Renaissance Tragedy, 17. See also H. B. Charlton, The Senecan Tradition in
Renaissance Tragedy: A Re-Issue of an Essay Published in 1921 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1946); John
William Cunliffe, The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy (Hamden, Conn: Archon Books, 1965);
and Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca (Oxford: Oxford UP,
1992).
62
Revenger’s Tragedy, and Shakespeare’s early historical tragedies confirm A. J. Boyle’s
claim that “furor is a central ingredient of what the Renaissance received as the Senecan
tragic self.”39 Senecan heroes, Boyle writes, “create a linguistic world with their self as
its referential centre,” and so it hardly comes as a surprise that the texts above, as well as
such popular Senecan texts as Thomas Newton’s translation of the tragedies, make heavy
use of reflexive pronouns in powerfully dramatic moments.40 Oedipus, for instance, when
asked from whom he flees when all his “graund Affaires” are gone, replies:
From none but from my selfe
Who haue a breast full fraught with guilte: who, wretched caitiffe Elfe
Haue all embrude my hands with bloud.41
Stripped, like Richard, of all the kingly sources of his identity, Oedipus turns to himself
by turning stylistically to “my selfe.” Plays that stage this autarchic self reach for a
language to bring that self into being. As a result, the language of self-reference becomes
loaded with representational value. Shakespeare, taking advantage of this potential value
in “my self,” gives the deposed king Richard a verbal means of self-reference and with it
a balance between constancy and fury. Over the course of his play, Shakespeare
introduces a Stoic hero into a world conventionally hostile to its presence, and in doing so
39 A. J. Boyle, Tragic Seneca: An Essay in the Theatrical Tradition (London: Routledge, 1997),
176.
40 Ibid., 175.
41 Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Seneca his tenne tragedies, translated into Englysh, trans. Thomas
Newton (London: Thomas Marsh, 1581), 45r. Cf. Kyd’s translation of Garnier’s neo-Senecan play
Cornelia, in which the title character laments: “O heauens, what shall I doe? alas must I, / Must I my selfe,
be murderer of my selfe? / Must I my selfe be forc’d to ope the way, / Whereat my soule in wounds may
sally forth?” See Robert Garnier, Cornelia, trans. Thomas Kyd (London: James Roberts, for N[icholas]
L[ing] and John Busbie, 1594), Cv.
63
bankrupts the Senecan historical-tragic mode.42 Unsurprisingly, Richard II is one of the
last Senecan historical tragedies, for the genre had little currency left once Richard begins
to self-speak.43
Reflexive pronouns thus contain a latent psychological content that inheres in
their use as representational tools. Shakespeare actualizes that content with his
exploitation of their grammatical status, his overdetermined patterning and placement of
them, and his responsiveness to their status as literary forms embedded in the Stoic
tradition. In the deposition, Richard speaks reflexively, indeed Stoically, as the parts of
himself coalesce in the linguistic ambiguity of “my self.” Critics who see Richard as fully
disunified often repeat and reaffirm critical commonplaces about the deposition scene:
Richard experiences abdication as a painful loss and fragmentation, and Richard’s
magniloquent rhetorical display throughout the scene derives from this fragmented
identity, which affords him freedom of expression. Forker, who ultimately supports these
commonplaces, argues that the deposition “expunges in a psychological sense the very
identity of the speaker.”44 Like others in the Kantorowiczean line, as well as those who
seek the “literary” Shakespeare, Forker risks looking so closely at what Shakespeare has
Richard say about his identity that he overlooks how Shakespeare has Richard speak.
Forker risks, that is, paying such close attention to Richard’s self-proclamation as a
“nothing” that he misses the more exciting fact that Richard has proclaimed himself a
42 See Boyle, Tragic Seneca, 179: “There are no Stoic heroes in Senecan tragedy.”
43 Sheldon Zitner, among others, speculates that Richard II shows Shakespeare putting an end to
the Senecan mode. See “Aumerle’s Conspiracy,” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 14, no. 2
(Spring 1974): 239-57.
44 Forker, “Unstable Identity,” 11.
64
nothing: self-deposition is Richard’s first complete, reflexive speech act. Richard talks
about himself and in doing so brings the parts of himself together in language. He speaks
as if he has a whole self, sustained within the reflexive pronouns’ grammatical and
literary assurance of self-possession. The unkinged Richard achieves, in other words, a
fiction of oneness in and through language.
If the stylistic self with which Richard speaks looks forward prophetically to
“modern” theories of reflexive, bourgeois subjectivity, as previous new historicist
approaches have asserted, then that bourgeois subjectivity is continuous with the “premodern” Stoic self.45 Having broken the mirror, a gesture I will address shortly, the now
ex-king hurls Bolingbroke’s words back at him:
’Tis very true, my grief lies all within;
And these external manners of laments
Are merely shadows to the unseen grief
That swells with silence in the tortured soul.
There lies the substance. (295-99)
This is not, as many critics hold, a moment rooted only in loss. Yes, he is talking about
grief, and a terrible grief at that. But Shakespeare is referring it persuasively and in a
deeply Stoic way to the “unseen” “soul” that lies “within,” and the verbal power Richard
derives from that reference allows him rhetorically to dominate the “silent king” Henry.
In ceasing to be king, Richard begins to speak with a Stoic sense of self.
45 See Hillman, Self-Speaking, 1-34 and Seigel, The Idea of the Self, 3-83. Braden describes how
Stoicism “help[s] the Renaissance mind negotiate its way into seventeenth-century rationality”
(Renaissance Tragedy, 86-7). Taylor directly connects Stoicism with the Enlightenment self, showing how
Descartes grounds his philosophy in Stoicism (Sources of the Self, 147-55).
65
By playing upon the ambiguity of “my self,” Richard speaks in a way he did not
as king: the reflexive/emphatic pronoun places him rhetorically outside discourse even as
it takes place in language. He speaks—or rather, he self-speaks—and therefore he is. The
mirror he demands and then breaks, linchpin of the Kantorowiczean reading, indites this
achievement of Stoic self-unity. For Richard’s “disunifiers,” though, the fragmented
mirror represents a fragmented self. Kantorowicz writes that
the mirror scene is the climax of [the] tragedy of dual personality. The lookingglass has the effects of a magic mirror, and Richard himself is the wizard who …
is forced to set his magic art to work against himself.46
Kantorowicz resorts to fairy tales to describe how Shakespeare destroys Richard’s unified
kingly identity by destroying the mirror that signifies it. “The splintering mirror,” he
writes, “means, or is, the breaking apart of any possible duality.”47 This reading has
persisted to the present.48 Yet Kantorowicz’s slippery phrasing “means, or is” elides
exactly the sense of oneness the reflexive pronoun offers. If the mirror only “means” or
signifies the destruction of Richard’s identity, then the mirror can work only as a symbol
of a pre-linguistic event that we cannot access. If, on the other hand, the mirror “is”
Richard’s demise, then it becomes impossible to account for his verbal domination of the
46 Kantorowicz, 39.
47 Ibid., 40.
48 See, among many others, Derek Traversi, Shakespeare, from Richard II to Henry V (London:
Hollis & Carter, 1958), 46; Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare’s Talking Animals (London: Edward Arnold,
1973), 90; Margaret Loftus Ranald, “The Degradation of Richard II: An Inquiry into the Ritual
Backgrounds,” English Literary Renaissance 7 (1977): 195; Christopher Pye, “The Betrayal of the Gaze:
Theatricality and Power in Shakespeare’s Richard II,” ELH 55, no. 3 (Fall 1988): 583; F. W. Brownlow,
“Richard II and the Testing of Legitimacy,” in Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s Richard II, ed. Kirby
Farrell, Critical Essays on British Literature (New York: G.K. Hall, 1999), 69; and Joseph Candido, “King
Richard’s ‘I,’” Religion and the Arts 5, no. 4 (2001): 464-84.
66
scene and his behavior throughout Act Five. Both options ironically overlook
Shakespeare’s language.
The mirror is less Richard’s romantic symbol than it is Shakespeare’s prop as he
unifies the parts of Richard in language. The mirror breaks for a rhetorical purpose—to
show Bolingbroke the state of kings. Having taunted Henry with the reflexive power of
his “mockery king of snow” speech, Richard demands a looking glass and promises to
satisfy the commons:
I’ll read enough
When I do see the very book indeed
Where all my sins are writ, and that’s myself [my selfe]. (273-75)
Again he repeats the crucial phrase, “my self”: he will read himself, and he will read his
self. All his sins—that is, all those acts that have previously thrown him into an
imbalanced multiplicity—come together in the book of his own identity, a fact that
reinforces the idea of the reflexive self as a linguistic artifact, a material originator of
verbal fictions. From that act of self-possession come the lines in which he begins to
speak of kingship as part of his past and part of Bolingbroke’s present and future:
No deeper wrinkles yet? Hath Sorrow struck
So many blows upon this face of mine
And made no deeper wounds? O, flatt’ring glass,
Like to my followers in prosperity,
Thou dost beguile me. Was this face the face
That every day under his household roof
67
Did keep ten thousand men? Was this the face
That like the sun did make beholders wink?
Is this the face which faced so many follies,
That was at last outfaced by Bolingbroke? (277-86)
For Kantorowicz and the majority of readers, the disjunction of “inner experience” and
“outer appearance” acts as evidence that Richard’s previously unified, stable identity has
dissolved.49 But isn’t it quite the opposite? Richard articulates more clearly than ever how
the parts of himself—his physical appearance, emotional experience, past and present
condition, and place as subject in the new order—fit together and relate to one another.
He looks in the mirror and registers “that his body natural has shown no change since his
abdication.”50 His repetition of the Marlovian “was this the face” drives home the
distinction between past and present as well as inside and outside. For the first time,
Richard addresses his former condition as king, and he does so fittingly in the past tense
(“did keep … did make … faced … outfaced”). But the questions have further, more
significant purpose as rhetorical questions. Like my own rhetorical question above (“isn’t
it quite the opposite?”), these interrogatives carry the force of indicative statements: this
was the face that kept ten thousand men, made beholders wink, and faced follies. The
questions refer to the very things that gave Richard such trouble as king. The excess of
feasting thousands, the continual recourse to sun imagery in an attempt at selfdescription, and Bolingbroke’s remarkably self-possessed rise: as we have seen, all are
49 Kantorowicz, 39.
50 Grady, Shakespeare, 97.
68
symptoms of Richard’s incapacity for reflexive self-speech. That his face has shown no
change matters less to Richard than it does to Bolingbroke, who faces the prospect of
inheriting Richard’s “cares.”
When Richard breaks the mirror, therefore, he breaks it because it no longer
represents his identity. He breaks it because it represents the kingly identity that he can
only now describe even as he loses it. If anything, in Richard’s rhetorically-geared speech
it represents Bolingbroke, soon to be the keeper of kingly “glory”:
A brittle glory shineth in this face—
As brittle as the glory is the face! [Shatters glass.]
For there it is, cracked in an hundred shivers.
Mark, silent King, the moral of this sport,
How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face. (287-91)
Shakespeare integrates Richard’s “glory” (the body politic) and “face” (the body natural)
in exactly the same way the grammaticalization process integrates “my” and “self.” He
erases verbally the apparent irreconcilability between kingly glory and human flesh,
something the king could not quite do before deposition. Richard turns his strikingly new
(and Stoic) language of selfhood against Bolingbroke to make the “moral” point—the
whole point of the entire speech—that the king’s “sorrow” will quickly destroy his
“face.” The whole speech, that is, aims to show Bolingbroke how the king, as king, will
struggle to bring the parts of himself together as a whole, and elicits precisely the reaction
Richard wants from Bolingbroke. The usurper, in pointing out that “The shadow of your
sorrow hath destroyed / The shadow of your face” (292-93), unwittingly provides
69
Richard with another opportunity to taunt him with reflexivity. Perhaps the censors who
kept this scene from being printed found it so objectionable because the king’s speech
seems to approve of, even underwrite, his own deposition. The ex-king is stronger—
rhetorically, personally, politically, and for the scene’s spectators, uncomfortably—than
he was as king, and certainly stronger than the king-to-be. Richard speaks as a subject,
and he seems to enjoy it.
Richard Alone
If Shakespeare dramatizes Henry’s first challenge as king in the Aumerle
conspiracy of Act Five, he also presents a newly reflexive Richard, who mixes unity with
fragmentedness and Stoic fury with Stoic constancy.51 To claim, as Richard Hillman
does, that Richard’s “new condition” after the deposition is “multiple and fragmentary
identities, in violent contrast with his former presumption of unitary selfhood” does not
so much miss the mark as it misses the marker.52 As Richard’s speech patterns have
shown, “unity” and “fragmentedness” only have meaning in relation to the speaker’s
ability to articulate himself as a whole or as fragments in a particular rhetorical situation.
In Richard’s soliloquy—the only one in the play—Shakespeare has him place himself on
the spectrum going from king to beggar and back again, thus making it seem reasonable
to call the ex-king “fragmentary.” But as we have seen in his speech during the
51 On Henry’s predicament, see Zitner, “Aumerle’s Conspiracy”; and James Black, “The
Interlude of the Beggar and the King in Richard II,” in Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theater, ed. David
M. Bergeron (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1985), 104-13.
52 Hillman, Self-Speaking, 109.
70
deposition, the impression of multiplicity derives from Richard’s newfound stylistic
capacity for wholeness, and not the other way around. He only knows how to talk about
himself as an organized set of parts because he has begun to talk about his self as a
whole. As James Siemon puts it, “Richard is less interested in the political reality
embodied in his forced resignation than in his attempt to construct an authority for
himself by means of extended self-possession.”53 In Act Five, Richard makes the most of
his newfound reflexive self-style. The act begins with his final conversation with the
Queen and Northumberland (5.1), in which he takes on the self-possessed ethos that
Gaunt earlier used to taunt and prophesy, and he fully describes that newfound sense of
self in his remarkable soliloquy and ensuing death.
Two final “my self”s and several other reflexive pronouns power the soliloquy,
working against the traditional claim that Richard suffers from “the absence of a stable
identity.”54 On the contrary, Richard demonstrates a distinctly Stoic indifference to all
manner of instability. Editors since Rowe have changed the Folio’s stage direction,
“Enter Richard,” to “Enter King Richard alone,” a change that occludes the extent to
which Richard is presented as an ordinary subject. His speech is self-willed discourse of
the Stoic kind; as Berger writes, “the illocutionary action of soliloquy is self-directed.”55
The fact that Richard is now out of power opens up the possibility of the reflexive selfspeech he struggled to perform as king:
53 James Siemon, Word Against Word: Shakespearean Utterance, Massachusetts Studies in Early
Modern Culture (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2002), 206.
54 Hillman, Self-Speaking, 109.
55 Berger, Imaginary Audition, 102.
71
I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world;
And, for because the world is populous
And here is not a creature but myself [my selfe],
I cannot do it. Yet I’ll hammer it out. (5.5.1-5)
Because he is now alone and disempowered, there is no one to talk to but himself. Even
before his sentence ends, he finds the way to “hammer it out.” He finds that the ability to
compare his prison to the world derives from himself—his self. From this self, the effect
of a grammaticalized and nominalized “my self,” he creates a “generation of stillbreeding thoughts” (8) that in turn perform reflexive actions in language: they “set the
word itself against the word” (13-14) and “flatter themselves” (23). He speaks of himself
as a multiplicity within wholeness, or as he puts it, “in one person many people” (31). He
even imagines that he is king again, but, he says, “treasons make me wish my self [my
selfe] a beggar” (33). Instead of “make me want to be a beggar” or the subjunctive “make
me wish I were a beggar,” Shakespeare gives Richard the word/phrase at the heart of
Richard’s troubles as king. Ambiguously playing both king and beggar leads Richard to a
seemingly nihilistic conclusion:
Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased
With being nothing. (38-41)
Following Kantorowicz’s line of reading, Forker strains to gloss these lines as “Richard
dwell[ing] on conflicting senses of his own identity, which tend to cancel each other out
72
and reduce him to nonentity” (39-41n). In their reflexive context, though, the lines read
easily as Richard’s most unified, stable, and existential moment. The prospect of “being
nothing” in death does not provoke conflict, but the comfort of self-sufficiency. Like
Brutus in Julius Caesar and Horatio in Hamlet, Shakespeare’s most famous Stoic figures,
Richard anticipates his own death with “ease” and indifference, as neither setback nor
achievement.
The self articulated here follows a Stoic model. Soliloquy, the act of talking to
oneself and of talking one’s self, counts as the pinnacle of Stoic self-possession, and
Richard’s talk of nothingness (38-41), his response to the music (41-48), his elaborate
clock conceit (49-60), and finally his anger at and subsequent gratitude for the music (6166) comport with and further elaborate a Stoic self. As Reydams-Schils observes, the
Stoic “is expected to hone the skill of talking to herself,” which Richard does here.56 This
is not to deny the emotional intensity of the speech, however, because as we have seen,
constancy and fury are two sides of the same philosophical coin. Winding up the speech,
Richard gets annoyed with the music:
This music mads me! Let it sound no more;
For though it have holp madmen to their wits,
In me it seems it will make wise men mad.
Yet blessing on his heart that gives it me,
For ’tis a sign of love. (61-65)
56 Reydams-Schils, The Roman Stoics, 18.
73
It is an odd moment, to be sure. Richard moves rapidly and with apparent instability from
anger to gratitude. “Wise men” means “sane men” and works as the antithesis to
“madmen,” but the term also has a strong Stoic meaning that contradicts any sense that
Richard has lost control here. From Stoicism’s origins into Shakespeare’s time, the term
“wise man” (Lat., “sapiens”) was applied to the fully self-possessed and self-ruled
person.57 Richard knowingly applies the term to himself, and thus his anger does not
reveal his loss of a sense of self. Rather, his sense of self produces his anger. In mastering
the ambiguity between the whole and its parts, Richard masters the ambiguity between
constancy and fury. Shakespeare introduces a Stoic hero into a Senecan tragic universe. If
he advances a new kind of subjectivity, therefore, he does so by writing it in and through
the powerfully Stoic “my self.”
Given Richard’s long trajectory toward that self-style, we expect a Stoic death of
the sort Brutus dies and Horatio wants to die. And in a way, we get what we expect,
though Shakespeare ironizes the self-unity Richard has experienced in his soliloquy.
Richard had put off the language of kingship that gave him so much trouble, but here he
seizes it once more. With surprising violence drawn straight from the Senecan dramatic
tradition, he defends himself against the murderers who “rush in” (104 SD):
How, now! What means Death in this rude assault?
Villain, thy own hand yields thy death’s instrument.
[Seizes a Servant’s weapon and kills him with it.]
Go thou, and fill another room in hell!
57 See ibid. and Braden, Renaissance Tragedy, 63-98.
74
[Kills another Servant.] Here Exton strikes him down.
That hand shall burn in never-quenching fire
That staggers thus my person. Exton, thy fierce hand
Hath with the King’s blood stained the King’s own land. (105-10)
Like most Senecan heroes, he takes violent action in the face of death, striking the
Keeper preemptively and, if the editorial tradition is correct, killing at least two of his
assailants. Richard shows neither fear nor cowardice but constancy. He defends himself
(and his self, his “person”) as he did not do when he eagerly surrendered to Bolingbroke
at Flint Castle (3.3). At the same time, however, Richard returns to the assertion of royal
privilege that prevented him from bringing the parts of himself (his “person”) together in
language. The couplets emulate his stately but unstable tenure as king, and his obsessive
repetition of “hand” tries to process why a supposedly divine king should die at a
subject’s hands. This renewed language goes against the self-speech of only moments
before. His sense of self, rooted in the “my self”s of the soliloquy, conflicts with the
expectations of majesty. Thus, even as his final couplet—“Mount, mount, my soul! Thy
seat is up on high, / Whilst my gross flesh sinks downward here to die”—articulates a
Stoic soul/body dualism, it reasserts the incompatibility of kingship and subjectivity
(111-12). In death, Richard cannot keep himself together. Then again, he no longer needs
to.
The death of Richard also marks the death of Senecan historical tragedy on the
English stage. Although the influence of Stoicism and of Seneca would persist into the
seventeenth century, few if any plays in the mode of Edward II, the Henry VI trilogy, and
75
indeed Richard II appeared once Richard’s gross flesh sunk downward. When
Shakespeare again took up the history play in 1 & 2 Henry IV and King John, he did so in
a distinctly different mode. Such a shift, both in Shakespeare’s writings and in the stage
and page marketplace, corresponds to Richard’s verbal shift, as if the self-deposing
king’s “my self” makes one huge and final withdrawal on the currency of the Senecan
stage.
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Chapter Two: Portia’s Laboratory
Shakespeare wrote relatively little in the two years between Richard II (1595) and
The Merchant of Venice (1597).1 Perhaps he found himself newly busy as a sharer in the
Chamberlain’s Men, with whom he toured the provinces and performed frequently at
court. Perhaps family obligations and pursuits kept him: in August 1596, his son Hamnet
died, and shortly thereafter his uncle Henry died too. In October of the same year, the
playwright successfully obtained a coat of arms in the name of his father, John. And in
1597, he purchased New Place, a house in his home town of Stratford. Like all of the
tantalizing documentary clues about Shakespeare’s life, these events have produced all
sorts of narratives about his family relationships, business dealings, and court
connections. One thing of which we can be mostly certain is that these dealings involved
Shakespeare traveling frequently to and from London. What would have changed in
London over these two years? What new buildings, people, and intellectual fashions
would Shakespeare have noticed each time he returned from the provinces? What new
books would he have seen in the book stalls of Paul’s Churchyard?
Shakespeare’s trips in and out of London would have given him a clear view of,
among other things, the culture of science growing rapidly in London. In just a few short
years, there arose in the city a buzz of interest in studying the natural world. The year
1596 saw the publication of Paracelsus’ A Hundred and Fourteen Experiments and
1 He probably wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream and King John, and he possibly collaborated
on Edward III.
77
Cures, followed in 1597 by Roger Bacon’s Mirror of Alchemy.2 This is not quite the
modern, institutionalized science as it would develop from the mid-seventeenth century
onward, although the Royal Society had its roots in 1590s London. Late Elizabethan
London was, in Deborah Harkness’s words, “a house of science and a prototype of a
modern laboratory,” in which “men and women … studied the natural world and tried to
find better ways to harness its powers and control its processes.”3 Instead of being
separate from or even hostile to the imaginative writing Shakespeare practiced, this
scientific activity was closely bound up with the arts of poetry and drama. As much
recent scholarship has demonstrated, “art was not separate from the practices that became
science but instrumental to them.”4 Coming from and going to London, therefore,
Shakespeare would have been keenly aware of exciting new ideas about what makes up
“science”—literally, about what it means to know.
The possibility of Shakespeare’s engagement with this scientific culture changes
how we understand The Merchant of Venice. In the play’s second scene, Portia proposes
2 Paracelsus, A hundred and fouretene experiments and cures of the famous physitian Philippus
Aureolus Theophrastus Paracelsus (London: Vallentine Sims, 1596); and Roger Bacon, The mirror of
alchimy, composed by the thrice-famous and learned fryer, Roger Bachon (London: [Thomas Creede] for
Richard Olive, 1597).
3 Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 8 and 6. Harkness argues that “there would have been no Scientific
Revolution in England without the intellectual vitality present in Elizabethan London, for she provided later
scientists with its foundations: the skilled labor, tools, techniques, and empirical insights that were
necessary to shift the study of nature out of the library and into the laboratory” (2).
4 Elizabeth Spiller, “Shakespeare and the Making of Early Modern Science: Resituating
Prospero’s Art,” South Central Review: The Journal of the South Central Modern Language Association
26, no. 1 (2009), 25. See also Spiller’s Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature: The Art of Making
Knowledge, 1580-1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Paolo Rossi, Philosophy,
Technology, and the Arts in the Early Modern Era (New York: Harper & Row, 1970); and Antonio PérezRamos, Francis Bacon’s Idea of Science and the Maker’s Knowledge Tradition (Oxford: Oxford UP,
1988).
78
running what is unmistakably a science experiment. Her lady-in-waiting Nerissa, hearing
Portia complain about the drunk, vile German suitor, points out that “If he should offer to
choose, and choose the right casket, you should refuse to perform your father’s will if
you should refuse to accept him.”5 This statement amounts to a triple-conditional: if the
German suitor attempts to choose the right casket, and if he chooses the correct one, and
if Portia refuses to marry him, then Portia will be going against her father’s will. Nerissa
articulates the contingencies of Portia’s situation using the word “if” and the subjunctive
“should.” Portia responds with a different kind of “if” statement:
Therefore, for fear of the worst, I pray thee set a deep glass of Rhenish wine on
the contrary casket, for if the devil be within, and that temptation without, I know
he will choose it. I will do anything, Nerissa, ere I be married to a sponge.
(1.2.78-81)
Both characters use “if” to articulate their situation, sentiments, values, and promises.
While Nerissa simply describes Portia’s circumstance with “if,” Portia uses “if” to make
a reasoned prediction about the German. In both cases, “if” is about knowledge. Whereas
Nerissa’s “if” assumes knowledge based on the contract of the father’s will, Portia’s “if”
offers to produce knowledge. Indeed, her confident “I know” only emerges once she has
outlined the experiment that will, when run, assure her knowledge. Further, Portia states
her motives outright for designing the test. She will do anything before she marries a
sponge, and the wine-on-casket experiment is the best way to discover whether the
5 Quotations come from The Merchant of Venice, ed. M. M. Mahood, updated ed. (Cambridge
UP, 2003).
79
German suitor is such a sponge and to lead him to make the incorrect choice. Even more
important, at the same time that she makes a tentative conjecture about the German,
Portia seems ready to skew the outcome of the casket test against him.
Critics writing about The Merchant of Venice often treat as unimportant the
question of Portia manipulation of the casket test for her own benefit. The notorious
suggestion that she embeds clues in what she says to Bassanio has remained an issue little
worth addressing seriously. Even when entertained, such a possibility, we are told,
“belittles Portia’s integrity” and better suits a detective novel than a Shakespeare play
(3.2.63n). Instead, when we do acknowledge Portia’s exercise of control, we describe her
as a playwright figure in the vein of Oberon, Hamlet, Iago, and Prospero.6 Yet even this
accurate label belies her particular means of knowing and controlling her circumstances.
In her statement to Nerissa, Portia specifies precisely how she plans to assert herself
within the legal bind of her father’s will: she designs an experiment that reveals the
suitor’s worth and thus the choice he will make. Unlike Nerissa’s “if” statement, which
describes an airtight set of conditions, Portia’s works as a hypothesis, an educated,
falsifiable guess: if we put wine on the wrong casket, then he will choose that casket.
Testing this hypothesis—this “provisional supposition” that “serves as a starting-point for
further investigations by which it may be proved or disproved”—will both generate
knowledge and benefit Portia.7
6 On Shakespeare’s fondness for the controlling playwright figure, see William Kerrigan, “The
Personal Shakespeare: Three Clues,” in Shakespeare’s Personality, ed. Norman N. Holland, Sidney
Homan, and Bernard J. Paris (Berkeley: U of California P, 1989), 175-90.
7 OED s.v. “hypothesis,” 3.
80
The question “How do we know?” is thus implicit in Portia’s and Nerissa’s
dialogue, especially in their use of the conjunction “if.” This chapter will show how
Shakespeare is thinking about knowledge in the whole of The Merchant of Venice, from
the moment Antonio enters complaining, “I know not why I am so sad” (1.1.1, emphasis
added). Interacting with the shifting state of Renaissance science and with Francis Bacon
in particular, Shakespeare takes dramatic advantage of the scientifically thick word “if”
and inflates its value to make it the basis for everything that happens in the play. He
dramatizes the conflict between a distinctly Baconian scientific method and a hypothesisbased one that eventually became modern scientific method. This contrast drives his most
unsettling comedy, which portrays a world in which knowledge is continually in
question, and in which epistemological claims regularly appear in the form of conditional
statements. As in Bacon’s writings, “if” statements in Merchant are made with the
presumption of knowledge or certainty, but often that certainty is totally undermined in
the course of the play. Into this world, Shakespeare introduces Portia, who demonstrates a
radically different way of knowing. Instead of assuming knowledge and relying on the
airtight conditions of contract, as Bacon and the men of Venice do, Portia persistently
attempts to produce knowledge, like Shakespeare’s many other knowledge-seeking
characters such as Hamlet and Prospero. In and through the rich potential of the
conjunction “if,” Shakespeare makes the play into a series of science experiments; and
the stage becomes Portia’s laboratory as she tests hypotheses about the world and the
people she encounters.
81
The language of certainty in the above definition of the hypothesis (“proved or
disproved”) goes to the heart of The Merchant of Venice, in which the play’s most
discussed concerns, including law, social class, and religion, revolve around the problem
of certainty—the problem, in other words, of knowledge.8 What so preoccupies us about
the play is its “failure … to provide a completely satisfying resolution to the dilemmas
raised in the course of the action.”9 This chapter will show how that “failure” results from
the progressive nature of the science on which the play is predicated. When tested, a
hypothesis generates knowledge, but it also leads to further hypotheses and experiments
that may invalidate the very knowledge it initially offered. In this way, the persistent
critical problems of Merchant—its unsatisfying comic resolution, its disturbing
repudiation and forced conversion of Shylock, and Bassanio’s dubious affection for
Portia—are a product of its scientific design. Thus what Lars Engle has described as the
play’s “skepticism” about noncontingent value arises in large part from its scientific
assumption that value is subject to variation based on experimentation.10 The knowledge
the play offers is, by the very means of its production, falsifiable. We cannot feel a final
8 Recent work on religion, law, and economics features, among others, Suzanne Penuel,
“Castrating the Creditor in The Merchant of Venice,” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 44, no.
2 (Spring 2004): 255-75; Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005); Heather Hirschfeld, “‘We All Expect a Gentle Answer, Jew’: The
Merchant of Venice and the Psychotheology of Conversion,” ELH 73, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 61-81; Grace
Tiffany, “Law and Self-Interest in The Merchant of Venice,” Papers on Language and Literature 42, no. 4
(Fall 2006): 384-400; M. Lindsay Kaplan, “Jessica’s Mother: Medieval Constructions of Jewish Race and
Gender in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 58, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 1-30; Aaron Kitch,
“Shylock’s Sacred Nation,” Shakespeare Quarterly 59, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 131-55; Janet Adelman,
Blood Relations: Christian and Jew in The Merchant of Venice (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008); and
Charlotte Artese, “‘You shall not know’: Portia, Power and the Folktale Sources of The Merchant of
Venice,” Shakespeare 5, no. 4 (2009): 325-37.
9 Walter Cohen, “The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism,” ELH 49,
no. 4 (Winter 1982): 775.
10 Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of His Time (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993), 77.
82
sense of comedic certainty because the hypothetical structure simply will not allow it,
even as that structure stands out as the best means to achieve knowledge, when compared
with the Baconian method. The resolution so unsettles us, in other words, because it is by
design unsettle-able, contingent, and structured around the small but incredibly rich
conjunction, “if.”
Shakespeare’s “if” and the Scene of Knowledge
Shakespeare uses the word “if” with surprising frequency in The Merchant of
Venice.11 With it he creates a scene of knowledge, a linguistic laboratory in which
knowledge is continually at stake. Indeed, throughout the play “if” appears in
suspiciously close proximity to the topic of knowledge and often to the word “know”
itself. Here are just a few examples (emphasis mine in all cases):
‐
Portia: If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had
been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces (1.2.11-12);
‐
Lancelot Gobbo: Nay indeed, if you had your eyes you might fail of the
knowing me: it is a wise father that knows his own child (2.2.62-63);
‐
Bassanio: I know thee well, thou hast obtained thy suit;
Shylock thy master spoke with me this day,
11 The play contains 120 instances of the word “if” in 20,921 words, or 57.36 “if”s per 10,000
words. Only two Shakespeare plays feature a greater frequency: As You Like It (64.77 “if”s per 10,000
words) and Much Ado (59.71 “if”s per 10,000 words). Bassanio uses “if” 14 times, Shylock 21 times, and
Portia a staggering 33 times. Numbers are derived from Marvin Spevack, ed., A Complete and Systematic
Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare, 6 vols. (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1968).
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And hath preferred thee, if it be preferment
To leave a rich Jew’s service to become
The follower of so poor a gentleman (119-23);
‐
Morocco: How shall I know if I do choose the right? (2.7.10);
‐
Lorenzo: But if you knew to whom you show this honour,
How true a gentleman you send relief,
How dear a lover of my lord your husband,
I know you would be prouder of the work
Than customary bounty can enforce you” (3.4.5-9).
Portia’s proverbial statement (“If to do …”) works as an “even if,” while Lancelot’s
proverb about a father’s knowledge (“if you had your eyes …”) provides him the means
to tease his father with an “if.” Bassanio’s “I know thee well” seems like a throwaway
line, until he qualifies his confidence with “if.” Morocco’s “How shall I know if” is the
syntactical center of his question, and likewise Lorenzo’s “if you knew … [then] I know
…” creates a centrifugal syntax of conditional knowledge. In each of these instances, as
in the play at large, Shakespeare promotes, stylistically, the connection between
conditionality and the problem of knowledge.
As this list demonstrates, in The Merchant of Venice Shakespeare uses the word
“if” to make various kinds of statements, from promises to expressions of sentiment, and
from argumentative claims to rhetorical questions. His characters almost always make
such statements with the presumption of knowledge amounting to certainty, but
Shakespeare repeatedly, almost compulsively, converts these ordinary hypotheticals into
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falsifiable, knowledge-producing hypotheses. Even though these statements are not
meant as hypotheses in the first place, the playwright proceeds to test—and often to
falsify—them, undermining the certainty with which they were spoken. As we will see,
Portia shares this habit with Shakespeare, but this does not imply that she becomes an
author figure only. Alone among the play’s characters, she demonstrates a full
appreciation for the knowledge-making power of the hypothesis. In a classic essay on
Shakespeare’s use of “if” in Othello, Madeleine Doran points to how this conversion
from hypothetical into hypothesis can take place in language:
Take the form in which the relation between condition and conclusion is assumed
to be necessary: If this is true, then that is; if this should happen, then that would.
The question in such a sentence is not about the conclusion, but about the
condition on which the conclusion or consequence is, or seems to be,
contingent.... The probability of the condition’s existing or occurring has to be
assessed on a scale of degrees. Probability amounting to certainty is at one end—
what may be and is; improbability, also amounting to certainty, is at the other—
what might conceivably be, but is not. Uncertainty lies in an indeterminate middle
zone between. When the condition is assumed to be only possible, it has
obviously less predictive force than when it is assumed to be fact.12
Doran refers, if only implicitly, to the potential for even the most certain “if” statement to
lose its absolute “predictive force”—to become a testable and thus falsifiable hypothesis.
Shakespeare changes what Doran calls the relation “between condition and conclusion”
12 Madeleine Doran, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Language (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1976), 68.
85
by testing these statements scientifically.13 He makes “if” statements “assumed to be
fact” into “condition[s] … assumed to be only possible.”14
This testing process arguably makes up the conditions for any imaginative
writing, because such writing takes place in the realm of possibility rather than certainty.
In the Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare self-consciously places the testing of certainty at
the center of the play’s action. For example, as Jessica prepares to leave her father to
marry Lorenzo, she makes a conditional statement: “If thou [Lorenzo] keep promise, I
shall end this strife / Become a Christian and thy loving wife” (2.3.19-20). She does not
mean this as an educated guess to be tested, but rather as a contract not unlike the one her
father makes with Antonio. If Lorenzo keeps his promise to take her away, then Jessica
will leave her father, convert to Christianity, and marry Lorenzo. Jessica states the lines
as a promise, not as a hypothetical prediction intended to produce knowledge. And yet
that is exactly what Shakespeare makes of them: Lorenzo does keep his promise, though
he did not have to, and we are left to observe and measure the way Jessica leaves her
father, converts, and marries. Shakespeare turns what she treats as unassailable
13 In Literate Experience: The Work of Knowing in Seventeenth-Century English Writing (New
York: Palgrave, 2002), Andrew Barnaby and Lisa Schnell argue that “the acceptance of contingency in the
communal pursuit of knowledge…demands that we dismiss the notion that a system of right knowing can
be constructed to produce purely mimetic, objective understanding without first subjecting the very
mechanisms of knowing to a process of experimental verification” (59). They equate that verification
process with “metatheatricality” and discuss how Shakespeare’s theater produced knowledge by working
self-critically. My concern here is not with how the play is about the theater as a scene of knowledge but
with how it is about “mechanisms of knowing” themselves—about, that is, how the play treats the question
of scientific knowledge.
14 On fact, see Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550-1720 (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell
University Press, 2000). On the legal qualities of fact, see Lorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law
and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
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knowledge into scientific data to be studied.15 More interesting, perhaps, is Lorenzo’s
“if” about Jessica in the following scene: “If e’er the Jew her father come to heaven, / It
will be for his gentle daughter’s sake” (2.4.33-34). Like Jessica, Lorenzo assumes
knowledge instead of seeking to produce it—a trait he may have learned from his friend
Bassanio. Again, Shakespeare tests this statement as a hypothesis, and in this case
falsifies it. If Shylock reaches Lorenzo’s heaven, it will not be for Jessica’s sake but
because of his forced conversion.16
By converting ordinary hypotheticals into scientific hypotheses in this way,
Shakespeare introduces a conflict between two ways of knowing: one that works like the
Baconian inductive method, which inheres in “if”s spoken out of certainty, and one that
works like the post-Baconian, hypothesis-driven one that would become the basis for
modern science. In the course of the play, Shakespeare privileges the hypothesis over
Baconian induction by undermining the latter’s claims to knowledge and by making the
former into the structural basis of the play’s major themes. What seems like a glaring
anachronism here—the application of modern scientific principles in a premodern,
dramatic text—is not one at all, for Shakespeare is engaging with texts and ideas that had
begun to circulate widely in his time. Indeed, the scientific hypothesis acquired its
modern form in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when natural philosophers such
as Copernicus and Galileo, along with the throng of vernacular scientists in
15 Indeed, critics still discuss the meaning of Jessica’s marriage to Lorenzo. See Anita Gilman
Sherman, “Disowning Knowledge of Jessica, or Shylock’s Skepticism,” SEL 44, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 27795, and Kaplan, “Jessica’s Mother.”
16 See Lupton, Citizen-Saints, 73-102; Hirschfeld, “Psychotheology”; and Adelman, Blood
Relations, 66-98.
87
Shakespeare’s London, began to make educated guesses about the physical world.17
Often phrased as an “if … then … ” statement, a hypothesis is a reasoned prediction
about how things work. For the hypothesis to produce knowledge, it must be testable. It
must, in other words, imply an experiment that will test the prediction—as in Portia’s
proposition about the German suitor. Moreover, the hypothesis must also be falsifiable. It
does not assume the certainty of the prediction, but instead depends upon the possibility
that the prediction may be wrong. The German might, admittedly against the odds,
choose the lead casket and thus falsify Portia’s hypothesis, just as Jessica might not,
despite her apparent certainty, manage to marry Lorenzo and convert to Christianity.
Whether successful or failed, the hypothesis produces knowledge rather than assumes its
accuracy.18 Finally, the hypothesis is progressive, in that a given test’s outcome leads to
further experiments, which may qualify or overturn the original test’s results. This last
quality is crucial for the conclusion of Shakespeare’s comedy, because the progressive
science that frees Antonio, condemns Shylock, and exposes Bassanio clashes with the
comedic certainty these events would seem to promote.
Yet modern science did not simply spring into being. Renaissance England’s most
famous scientist, Francis Bacon, helped to shape the nature of scientific inquiry for
17 See Ralph M. Blake, Theories of Scientific Method: The Renaissance Through the Nineteenth
Century (Seattle: U of Washington P, 1960); A. Rupert Hall, The Revolution in Science, 1500-1750, 3rd ed.
(London: Longman, 1983); and Barry Gower, Scientific Method a Historical and Philosophical
Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002). It seems worth noting that revisionist scholars believe that
Galileo, like Portia, was prepared to skew the outcomes of his experiments. See Paul Feyerabend, Against
Method, 3rd ed. (London: Verso, 1993).
18 According to Karl Popper’s well-known argument, a failed hypothesis is the only kind that
produces knowledge. A successful hypothesis is only waiting to be disproved. See Karl Popper, The Logic
of Scientific Discovery (1935; London: Routledge, 2002).
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centuries.19 Taking “all knowledge” as his “province,” Bacon introduced a radically new
method for gaining knowledge.20 Reversing the Aristotelian method of starting from
general axioms and reconciling sensory information to them (“saving the phenomena”),
Bacon proposed a method that starts with sensory data and works toward increasingly
more general axioms. According to this method, the scientist collects sensory data into
organized “natural histories,” and once enough information has been collected and
ordered, the scientist moves up the inductive chain toward natural laws. Thus for Bacon
the pursuit of knowledge, in Paolo Rossi’s words, is not “contemplation or recognition,
but … a hunt, an exploration of unknown lands, a discovery of the unknown.”21 The
scientist watches, and that act of organized observation constitutes scientific experiment.
Bacon, however, never articulated a need for the hypothesis, even if much of his
writing points toward it. Many scholars have claimed that he was unfriendly, even
hostile, to any sort of theoretical or contingent framework. Because his method stressed
pure induction, the argument goes, Bacon cannot have entertained the possibility that a
natural philosopher would make an educated guess. If sense data have been compiled
well enough, one would never need to make a prediction about how things work. David
19 For various perspectives on Bacon’s contested status as the father of modern science, see
Michel Malherbe, “Bacon’s Method of Science,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, ed. Markku
Peltonen (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 75-98; Antonio Pérez-Ramos, “Bacon’s Legacy,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Bacon, 311-34; and Paolo Rossi, “Bacon’s Idea of Science,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Bacon, 25-46. See also Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, trans. Sacha
Rabinovitch (London: Routledge, 1968); and Antonio Pérez-Ramos, Francis Bacon’s Idea of Science and
the Maker’s Knowledge Tradition (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988).
20 Francis Bacon, The Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, 7 vols.
(London: Longman, 1861), 1.109. See Malherbe, “Bacon’s Method of Science,” 76; and Dennis Desroches,
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge (London: Continuum, 2006).
21 “Bacon’s Idea of Science,” 31.
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Brewster, the nineteenth-century scientist, critiqued Bacon’s science “because it left no
room for the formation of hypotheses—a function of a man’s imaginative capacities—
and was systematically hostile to their elaboration.”22 Bacon mistrusted the imagination,
which he believed leads men astray from what is real. Correspondingly, Bacon also
mistrusted ornamented language—also a function of the imagination—and preferred
instead a plain, aphoristic style, which he considered to be a “vehicle of pure truth.”23
Eloquence, he believed, counts as a form of deception.
Bacon’s method of pure induction and the attendant suspicion of poetic ornament
inhabit his work as early as his 1597 book of Essays. Circulated in manuscript a year or
so before publication, just as Shakespeare was writing Merchant, the essays are made up
of aphorisms collected under subject headings that resonate topically in Merchant,
including “Of Followers and Friends,” “Of Suitors,” “Of Expense,” and “Of
22 Quoted in Pérez-Ramos, “Bacon’s Legacy,” 325. See also Hiram Haydn, The CounterRenaissance (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 251-76. Although he does not prescribe the hypothesis as a
means for achieving knowledge, much of Bacon’s writing implies its necessity, as Robert Boyle recognized
in the seventeenth century. Barnaby and Schnell quote Boyle, who “observes that all making of hypotheses
(what he terms ‘superstructures’) must be ‘looked upon only as temporary’; indeed, the very provisionality
of experimental evidence and ‘superstructures’ is intended to be productive in that ‘truth does more easily
emerge out of error’ (a point he makes with explicit reference to Bacon—’a great philosopher’—whose
work Boyle consistently holds up as a model of scientific style)” (Literate Experience, 42). In keeping with
this perspective, Peter Urbach argues that Bacon silently understood the necessity of the hypothesis: in
Bacon “there is no attempt to disparage speculation [i.e., the hypothesis] in science.” See “Francis Bacon as
a Precursor to Popper,” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 33, no. 2 (June 1982): 116. If
Bacon wished to incorporate the hypothesis into his method, he did not do so explicitly. Instead, his method
opened the door, as it were, for a fully hypothesis-based science to take hold. See also Peter Urbach,
Francis Bacon’s Philosophy of Science: An Account and a Reappraisal (La Salle, Ill: Open Court, 1987);
and Desroches, Francis Bacon, 125-27.
23 Brian Vickers, Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose (Cambridge UP, 1968), 73. Vickers has
shown that the plain, aphoristic style Bacon prefers is part of his inductive method. The Essays represent
“the nearest Bacon comes to communicating his observation of man and society in ‘pure’ aphorisms” (88),
which always play “a central role in the inductive process” (82). Taking her cue from Vickers, Lisa Jardine
argues that Bacon uses the essay form “as a ‘method’ for projecting [practical] precepts in an appealing and
readily acceptable form”; see Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1974), 228.
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Negotiating.”24 As in the play, the “if” statements in the Essays often relate to the topic of
knowledge. For example, one aphorism reads:
He that questioneth much shall learn much, and content much, specially if he
apply his questions to the skill of the person of whom he asketh, for he shall give
them occasion to please themselves in speaking, and himself shall continually
gather knowledge.”25
This sentence also amounts to a description of how Bacon’s scientific method might
work in a social setting. Knowledge is best “gather[ed]” by simply asking others who
already know and collecting as much information as possible. Knowledge can only be
discovered, not produced. In general, the Essays aim to transmit already-achieved
knowledge, and thus any conditionality couched in “if” statements, of which Bacon offers
plenty, is not meant as provisional or falsifiable, nor does it make new knowledge. For
example, he famously writes in “Of Studies”:
Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.
And therefore if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer
little, he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have much
cunning, to seem to know that he doth not.26
This aphorism delivers knowledge in highly organized and classified segments by
starting, as Bacon’s scientific method does, at the lowest levels of the inductive chain. If a
man does not write much, then he must have a good memory. As in Jessica’s and
24 Francis Bacon: The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), 81-89.
25 Ibid., 82, emphasis mine.
26 Ibid., 81.
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Lorenzo’s statements cited above, these “if”s serve as markers of possibility not makers
of knowledge. They evince a cause-and-effect process, like a contract: because a man
writes little, he needs to have a good memory. We might, of course, try to test this
statement as a hypothesis. We might try to find someone who writes little and has a bad
memory but still excels academically. But to do so would be quite foreign to the purpose
of the aphorism. We are not meant to test it (and thus produce knowledge) but to accept it
as already containing knowledge. In this way, Bacon uses “if” the way many characters
in The Merchant of Venice do, particularly Bassanio and Shylock, who recapitulate a
method very similar to Bacon’s.
Contract Versus Hypothesis
In the play’s main conflict, between Antonio and Shylock, Shakespeare shows
how the conditional rules of economics and contracts—and the flesh bond in particular—
are just as susceptible as other “if”s to the process of experimental verification. In a
speech quoted and analyzed in many critical essays on The Merchant of Venice, Antonio
explains why the Duke must grant the forfeit:
The Duke cannot deny the course of law;
For the commodity that strangers have
With us in Venice, if it be denied,
Will much impeach the justice of the state,
Since that the trade and profit of the city
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Consisteth of all nations. (3.3.26-31)
If the commodity of strangers is denied, then the justice of the state will be impeached.
Once more, Antonio does not mean this statement as a falsifiable hypothesis. Like
Shylock, he believes that to let him off would undermine entirely the Venetian economic
and political system. As with Lorenzo’s and Jessica’s “if” statements above, however,
this one, based on what Antonio assumes is legal certainty, gets tested as an educated
guess. Thanks to Portia’s legal maneuvering—and, as we will see, her scientific
prowess—the trial scene falsifies the relationship Antonio posits between economy, law,
and flesh bond. When she avoids impeaching the “justice of the state” while managing to
free Antonio from the bond, Portia falsifies what the merchant believes is a cause-andeffect relationship between justice and the “commodity of strangers.”
The contract between Shylock and Antonio works as the opposite of a scientific
hypothesis. Whereas the hypothesis uses an “if … then …” structure to make a reasoned,
testable prediction, the contract uses “if” to organize contingencies. Shylock describes the
flesh bond this way:
If you repay me not on such a day,
In such a place, such sum or sums as are
Expressed in the condition, let the forfeit
Be nominated for an equal pound
Of your fair flesh. (1.3.139-43)
William Scott has pointed out that this is not the bilateral contract of today’s legal
system, in which both parties agree to a set of terms which they must fulfill. Rather, it is a
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“unilateral pledge to pay a forfeit of flesh unless Antonio releases himself from his bond
by repaying the loaned money.”27 The flesh, not the loan, is the main point of the
contract. The money is only the condition by which Antonio can avoid having to give it
up. This legal structure is embodied in the very syntax of Shylock’s speech: the lender
phrases the bond as a conditional “if … then …” to be fulfilled, either positively or
negatively. Readers of the play tend to see Shylock advocating for justice and Antonio
pleading for mercy, but that difference only highlights the way they both maintain
absolute reliance on the certainty of the conditions listed. They never pause to imagine
what might happen if Antonio failed to pay back the money and yet did not lose a pound
of flesh. Once more, however, Shakespeare turns the conditions of contract into a
hypothesis. He treats the condition as an independent variable (Antonio does not repay
Shylock), tests the contract as a hypothesis (in the trial scene), and falsifies it. In this
regard, Shylock’s style of Judaism and Antonio’s style of Christianity are not so different
when seen through the lens of contract versus experiment. What has long been seen as a
sticky legal question becomes a scientific one.
Both Shylock’s and Antonio’s confident “if” statements leading up to the bondsealing also get tested and falsified as hypotheses. Shylock’s infamous aside amounts to a
promise: “If I can catch [Antonio] once upon the hip, / I will feed fat the ancient grudge I
bear him” (1.3.38-39). Shylock means this as a promise with a necessary condition
attached. Shylock predicts that if he can catch Antonio, then he will feed his grudge, but
27 William O. Scott, “Conditional Bonds, Forfeitures, and Vows in The Merchant of Venice,”
English Literary Renaissance 34, no. 3 (November 2004): 286.
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the play shows how this does not occur. Shakespeare falsifies the hypothesis Shylock
never knew he made. Similarly, Antonio’s “if” in response to Shylock’s accusations of
mistreatment (98-121) does not seem testable:
If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not
As to thy friends, for when did friendship take
A breed for barren metal of his friend?
But lend it rather to thine enemy,
Who if he break, thou mayst with better face
Exact the penalty. (124-29)
If you lend the money, he says, then lend it to your enemy, so that if your enemy breaks
the bond, then you can exact the penalty with full credibility. These are contractual “if”
statements, not experimental ones. They create an ethical system by which events can and
should unfold. But by the play’s end, this “if” structure has been converted into a
hypothesis. Antonio does break the bond, but Shylock is unable to exact the penalty with
any “face” at all. Along with Shylock’s “if” promise, Antonio’s “if” thus becomes a
knowledge-producing statement rather than a knowledge-assuming one, qualifying Janet
Adelman’s claim that Antonio’s chief desire is “to be known inside out” by Bassanio and
that Shylock’s bond offers him that chance.28 Instead, the knowledge that the Shylock /
Antonio bond produces results from its failure as a scientific experiment. If Antonio had
fulfilled the bond, or if the contract’s “if” were not tested and falsified as a hypothesis, no
new knowledge would be produced.
28 Adelman, Blood Relations, 120.
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Shakespeare carries this noticeable lack of imagination through the play, even in
the most dramatic moments. Shylock’s revenge monologue contains all the makings of
the hypothesis-based scientific method, but Shylock does not use the speech to produce
knowledge.29 Instead he uses “if” for a powerfully rhetorical end, justifying his revenge.
It features a flurry of “if” statements and even a few experiments:
Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses,
affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same
winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you
tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us,
shall we not revenge? If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge.
If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example?
Why, revenge! The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but
I will better the instruction. (3.1.42-57)
Shylock's conclusion, “I am justified in revenge,” results from a logical exposition based
on empirical observation. In rhetorical questions that have an indicative impact, he asserts
that Jews, like Christians, have eyes, hands, organs, etc. If you prick us, then we will
bleed; if you tickle us, then we will laugh; if you poison us, then we will die; and if you
wrong us, then we will revenge. These “if” statements even imply experiments. For
example, the hypotheses “if you tickle a Jew, then he will laugh” offers to produce
29 Anita Gilman Sherman reads Shylock as a “skeptic who cannot bear to acknowledge the
failures of his knowledge” (“Disowning Knowledge,” 277). She argues that Shylock “has confidence that
eyesight provides the knowledge necessary for assessing situations and making judgments,” so that
ultimately he must disavow his failure to know his daughter (280).
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knowledge of how Jews are similar to or different from Christians. The experiment based
on this hypothesis would involve tickling a Christian and a Jew, and measuring what each
does. Shylock, of course, does not intend to test these statements. They serve as claims of
already-possessed knowledge, and he uses them for their rhetorical force. On that
knowledge rests his justification for revenge, culminating in the final “if,” which gets
tested as a hypothesis: “If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by
Christian example? Why, revenge!” If a Christian wrongs a Jew, then the Jew will
justifiably take revenge. Like Antonio, Shylock thinks more like a merchant than a
chemist—or indeed, a poet. Shakespeare actuates the independent variable (“If a
Christian wrongs a Jew”—whether this includes Antonio’s past behavior toward Shylock
or his failure to meet the bond) and then measures whether the Jew will justifiably take
revenge—which Shylock is not allowed to do.
The Casket Hypothesis
Into this world of Baconian knowers, Shakespeare introduces Portia, whose
command of the play has long puzzled and delighted us. The Lady of Belmont is not
Shakespeare’s first playwright character, who exerts influence over events and people,
and she is certainly not the last. Yet unlike earlier such characters (e.g., Oberon, Friar
Lawrence, and Gloucester) and later ones (e.g., Rosalind, Hamlet, Iago, and Prospero),
Portia operates unmistakably as a hypothesis-driven scientist. She transforms her father’s
casket test into an experiment designed to ascertain each suitor’s worth. In doing so, she
97
addresses the play’s crucial question, which Shylock’s revenge speech has long been seen
as expressing: how do we know the value and nature of another person?30 More than the
suitors, Portia’s experiment tests an educated guess about the suitors: if a suitor is worthy
of Portia, then he will choose the correct casket. Portia proves willing to skew the
experiment’s variables to achieve the outcome she desires, yet she does so without
invalidating the hypothesis being tested.31 Testing the “if”s of others and using “if” for
her own ends, she preempts in dialogue the experiment the caskets themselves embody
and places Morocco, Arragon, and Bassanio on mental trajectories that reveal their worth.
Bassanio, bearing what Shakespeare presents as an uncanny resemblance to Francis
Bacon, chooses the casket he does for reasons other than those the casket hypothesis
predicts, thus spoiling the experiment but leading to a new one in the ring test.
Shakespeare shows Portia’s imaginative science at work in her first exchanges
with Morocco. She makes the prince reveal his ways of evaluating things and people, so
that she knows which casket he will choose. After the prince assures her that his blood is
red and that his “aspect” has frightened his enemies and enabled him to woo many wellregarded virgins, Portia in turn assures him:
But if my father had not scanted me,
30 While we would not consider this a scientific question, in Shakespeare’s England such
knowledge was only beginning to separate from the study of the physical world. See Jonathan Sawday, The
Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995),
esp. 230-70; Paula Blank, Shakespeare and the Mismeasure of Renaissance Man (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell UP,
2006), 80-117; and David Hillman, Shakespeare’s Entrails: Belief, Scepticism and the Interior of the Body,
Palgrave Shakespeare Studies (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 1-58.
31 Samuel Ajzenstat reads the caskets as a test of worth that is nevertheless subject to Portia’s
influence: “The choice of the caskets is cunningly arranged to appear to reflect the values of Belmont—
which are supposed to be Portia’s—while actually attracting someone who not only has a fair amount of
Venice in his soul but also knows how to hide it.” See “Contract in The Merchant of Venice,” Philosophy
and Literature 21, no. 2 (October 1997): 270-71.
98
And hedged me by his wit to yield myself
His wife who wins me by that means I told you,
Yourself, renowned prince, then stood as fair
As any comer I have looked on yet
For my affection. (2.1.17-22)
If I were not subject to my father’s will, Portia says, then you, Morocco, stand as good a
chance as the other suitors I have seen. This comment works as a backhanded
compliment. Indeed, it hardly counts as a compliment at all, because she has strongly
disliked every suitor she has “looked on yet,” as we the audience well know. Her aim,
though, is to test Morocco and observe his response. Portia’s father has “scanted” her,
and so her statement, “if my father had not scanted me … then [you] stood as fair / As
any comer,” is not a testable hypothesis. But the implied inverse of the line is easily
tested: if my father had scanted me, then you do not stand “as fair as any comer.” When
he takes her statement as a compliment and responds, “Even for that I thank you,”
Morocco proves her hypothesis and produces knowledge about himself (22). His
response tells Portia that the value of Morocco’s deeds and appearance is subject to her
verification, because he shows his willingness to accept as true whatever she says about
him. He depends on her to sanction and determine his worth.
When Morocco chooses his casket, therefore, we know what choice he will make.
Portia has shown that although he values himself, that value derives from her
approbation. Her value makes his value certain. He chooses the gold casket for precisely
this reason. Pausing over the silver casket, he considers his own worth:
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If thou be’st rated by thy estimation
Thou dost deserve enough; and yet enough
May not extend so far as to the lady;
And yet to be afeared of my deserving
Were but a weak disabling of myself.
As much as I deserve: why, that’s the lady.
I do in birth deserve her, and in fortunes,
In graces, and in qualities of breeding:
But more than these, in love I do deserve. (2.7.26-34)
In the final six lines here (“And yet … I do deserve”) Morocco attempts to assert his
value, but the first three lines have already done their damage. “Enough,” he admits,
“may not extend so far as to the lady.” His claim to deserve Portia proves unconvincing,
to us and to himself, in part because he qualifies his self-assertion with an “if,” which in
the play’s scene of knowledge cannot pass as certainty. Already thinking about Portia’s
value as the guarantor of his own, he moves to the gold casket:
‘Who chooseth me, shall gain what many men desire.’
Why, that’s the lady; all the world desires her.
From the four corners of the earth they come
To kiss this shrine, this mortal breathing saint. (37-40)
This time the phrase “Why, that’s the lady” directly answers the casket’s prompt. He
focuses so exclusively on Portia’s worth that he continues to praise her for eighteen more
lines (41-59), leaving behind his queries about the silver, which is, he says, “ten times
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undervalued to tried gold” (53). Portia’s suggestive “if” reveals how Morocco values. It
encourages him to continue on that mental trajectory until, by overvaluing Portia and
undervaluing himself, he chooses the wrong casket.
Arragon’s reason for choosing the silver casket is the opposite of Morocco’s for
choosing the gold. Although Portia and Arragon share little dialogue before the prince
makes his choice, they have enough time for Portia to send him too off on a mental
trajectory toward the wrong casket. Once she reviews the contractual details, Portia adds:
“To these injunctions everyone doth swear / That comes to hazard for my worthless self”
(2.9.16-17). Having spoken to him in respectful vocatives, “noble prince” and “my lord”
(4, 7), she gives herself the somewhat unexpected label of “worthless.” If Portia considers
herself worthless, this is the first time she has mentioned it. As with Morocco, however,
she aims to make Arragon reveal his nature. Instead of contradicting her self-description
as “worthless,” he refocuses on himself: “And so have I addressed me” (18). He
dismisses the lead casket out of hand, and the gold he rejects because it associates him
with “barbarous multitudes” (32). When he comes to the silver, he exults in his
superiority over those who have not deserved their honor:
‘Who chooseth me, shall get as much as he deserves.’
And well said too, for who shall go about
To cozen Fortune and be honourable
Without the stamp of merit? Let none presume
To wear an undeserved dignity.
O, that estates, degrees, and offices
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Were not derived corruptly, and that clear honour
Were purchased by the merit of the wearer! (35-42)
Given that he invoked Fortune when he began his speech (18), Arragon does not include
himself in this presumptuous group of posers. He sees everyone—including, of course,
heiresses who have not earned the titles and money they possess—as worthless, or at
least worth less than himself. Thus when he chooses, it is because he “assume[s] desert”
(50). Portia’s combined respectfulness and self-deprecation expose Arragon’s arrogance.
And perhaps tellingly, he does not utter a single “if,” which may have prevented him
from becoming a “deliberate fool” (79).
Bassanio is different from the previous suitors. He invalidates the casket
experiment when he chooses the lead for reasons other than what the hypothesis predicts.
Instead of choosing because he is worthy (which, as we have seen, is a function of the
suitor’s valuing of Portia), Bassanio chooses the lead because he trusts plainness over
ornament and eloquence. His method, distinctly similar to Bacon’s, temporarily thwarts
the hypothetical nature of Portia’s experiment even as it exposes his lack of imagination.
To understand how this epistemological conflict works, we need to consider Bassanio’s
strong associations with Bacon, and Baconian scientific method in particular. For
example, the arrow-shooting analogy he uses on Antonio in the opening scene evinces his
inductive approach to knowledge. It reads as a textbook description of the discovery
process that makes up Bacon’s method:
In my schooldays, when I had lost one shaft,
I shot his fellow of the selfsame flight
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The selfsame way, with more advised watch
To find the other forth; and by adventuring both
I oft found both. (1.1.139-43)
As readers often remark, Bassanio must make this over-the-top funding request, so that
Antonio can act offended and affection can overcome, or at least circumscribe,
Bassanio’s willingness to exploit his friend. But consider how Bassanio says he will
achieve knowledge: he will watch and adventure. Observation and discovery, as we have
seen, are the two mainstays of Bacon’s inductive method, in which the would-be knower
uses sensory aids to gather data and move up the inductive ladder from particulars to
more general axioms. Bassanio’s success in finding the arrow—that is, in achieving
knowledge—depends on his ability to follow empirical data. Such a process, moreover,
requires no imagination or creativity whatsoever, because the knowledge-seeker remains
completely passive.
In the lead up to Bassanio’s casket choice, the middle point of the play,
Shakespeare places the two modes of knowledge-seeking in sharp contrast. Portia repeats
the same process she used on Morocco and Arragon, only she aims at the opposite
outcome. She cues Bassanio’s “worthiness” as the casket hypothesis defines it. She opens
with a much-discussed bout of mathematical language:
Beshrew your eyes!
They have o’erlooked me and divided me:
One half of me is yours, the other half yours—
Mine own, I would say: but if mine then yours,
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And so all yours. (3.2.14-18)
Rather than affectionate or acquiescent, Portia is “chiding” Bassanio, as Natasha Korda
points out. The quasi-mathematical formulation, “if mine then yours, / And so all yours”
implicitly promises the “control she will retain over her inherited estate,” because the
formula also works in reverse, giving Portia a claim to everything Bassanio owns.32 But
the statement’s conditionality also suggests a reflexive property of ownership by which
Bassanio must give up (or “hazard”) his rights in order to gain them. Portia confirms this
logic when she effectively reveals the hypothesis on which the casket test is based: “If
you do love me, you will find me out” (41). If you love me, then you will choose the right
casket: this is the prediction at the experiment’s heart. As if this were not enough, she
then states outright, “I stand for sacrifice,” a line that again prompts Bassanio to give up
everything and thereby gain it (57). Finally, she orders a song that will provide a
perspective on Bassanio’s choice, which many have seen as containing a suggestion to
choose the lead casket.33 Portia anticipates and shapes the test’s results without
contradicting her father’s will.
Portia thus does everything she can to place Bassanio on a mental trajectory
toward the lead. Bassanio does not need it, however, nor does he respond, as Morocco
32 Natasha Korda, “Dame Usury: Gender, Credit, and (Ac)counting in the Sonnets and The
Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 60, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 141-42. Grace Tiffany notes that
Portia is just as concerned as everyone else to “keep what she owns.” Portia “does not cheat but hints”
(“Law and Self-Interest,” 390-91). Scott writes how “within the fabulous conditions of the will that directs
Portia’s marriage, Bassanio still solicits, and Portia asserts, her own act of choice” (“Conditional Bonds,”
305).
33 John Weiss long ago argued that the song’s warning against superficiality tips off Bassanio.
Later scholars noted that the song’s first three lines end with words that rhyme with “lead” (bred, head,
nourishèd).
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and Arragon did, by revealing his “worth.” According to Portia’s suggestions, he is
supposed to choose the casket because he loves Portia and is willing to sacrifice for her,
because if he loves her (i.e., values her correctly), then he will find her out (i.e., choose
the lead casket). Instead, he chooses it based on his Baconian scientific method and
mentality. Rather than taking from Portia’s song a perspective that would help him value
the lady correctly, he takes from it the Baconian mandate to mistrust ornament:
So may the outward shows be least themselves:
The world is still deceived with ornament.
In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt
But, being seasoned with a gracious voice,
Obscures the show of evil? In religion,
What damned error but some sober brow
Will bless it and approve it with a text,
Hiding the grossness with fair ornament?
There is no vice so simple but assumes
Some mark of virtue on his outward parts. (73-82)
Bassanio’s lines recapitulate Bacon’s notorious preference for plainness over ornament.
In The Advancement of Learning (1605), Bacon memorably criticizes those who would
“bring in an affectionate study of eloquence.” Men, he writes,
hunt more after words than matter; and more after the choiceness of the phrase,
and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the
clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures,
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than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of
invention or depth of judgment.34
Like Bassanio, Bacon sees ornament as a distraction from the “matter” and as a means for
deception. Like Bacon, Bassanio mistrusts rhetoric that does not “insinuate the desired
conclusion into the mind of the audience.”35 When Bassanio chooses the lead, he does so
based on this mistrust of ornament:
But thou, thou meagre lead
Which rather threaten’st than dost promise aught,
Thy paleness moves me more than eloquence:
And here choose I. Joy be the consequence! (104-7)
He says nothing—nothing—of his love for Portia or his valuing of her. He chooses the
lead for its “paleness,” which at least one editor (Theobald) emended to “plainness” to
enhance the contrast with “eloquence.” What the casket hypothesis had predicted as a
causal relationship (a suitor will choose the lead casket because he is worthy of Portia),
Bassanio reveals as correlational. Unlike Morocco and Arragon, Bassanio undermines
entirely the predictive force of the casket test. He manages to choose the correct casket
without “proving” (as Portia wants him to do) that he is worthy. True to hypothesis-based
science, however, the casket test’s failure does expose Bassanio’s lack of imagination,
which Portia exploits when she retests her husband in the so-called ring test.
34 Francis Bacon: The Major Works, 139.
35 Jardine, Francis Bacon, 226. See also Vickers, Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose and
Vickers, “Bacon and Rhetoric,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, 200-31.
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Bassanio Retested
Shakespeare brings two knowledge systems into conflict once again at the play’s
end. More than “material for Portia’s final educative gesture,” the ring test generates
knowledge that Portia herself does not possess.36 Bassanio had disposed of the category
“worthy” when he chose the lead casket for the reasons he did, using the method he did.
He exposed how slippery “worthiness” can be. Now, instead of making worth alone the
independent variable of Portia’s new hypothesis (as he did in the casket test),
Shakespeare makes knowing the independent variable: if Bassanio knows Portia’s worth,
then he will keep the ring. Taking a cue from Shylock, Portia uses science for her own
rhetorical ends, ultimately putting Bassanio in an epistemological double-bind. He does
not possess knowledge, and his method cannot produce it. The hypothesis-based method
here finally overwhelms the Baconian inductive one by testing and proving itself more
effective at the discovery of knowledge. Yet, in keeping with the progressive nature of
that method, the ring test leaves us unsettled because the knowledge it makes remains
susceptible to subsequent falsification. The test begins at the end of the trial scene when
Portia, already ensconced in the epistemologically authoritative disguise of Dr. Balthazar,
solicits the ring from her husband:
And if your wife be not a mad woman,
And know how well I have deserved this ring,
She would not hold out enemy for ever
For giving it to me. (4.1.441-44)
36 Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism, 96.
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If your wife knows how much I deserve, then she will not stay angry forever. Portia—
whose assumed name, Balthazar, suggests a comparison to the Biblical Daniel, the
prophet who understood the nature of prediction—dares Bassanio to test this prediction,
and he does so by giving the ring.37 She insinuates that the exchange of rings has to do
with Portia’s knowledge, not Bassanio’s. In doing so, she sets him on a mental trajectory
that reveals how little he himself knows.
The experiment proceeds throughout Act Five, where we find some of
Shakespeare’s most celebrated lines on knowledge, the greatest of which are Lorenzo’s
explanations of why humans cannot hear the music of the spheres (5.1.54-88).38 The
conflict between Portia and her husband, however, makes up Shakespeare’s final
epistemological claim. On her return to Belmont, Portia offers a characteristic
proclamation about knowledge:
The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark
When neither is attended; and I think
The nightingale, if she should sing by day
When every goose is cackling, would be thought
No better a musician than the wren. (102-6)
If the nightingale sang by day, she says, then its music would sound no better than the
wren’s. Nothing is good without respect; context makes the subject seem good or bad and
gives us a means of judgment. This statement directly opposes Bassanio’s rationale for
37 See Adelman, Blood Relations, 132. Of course, Shylock and Gratiano refer to Portia as Daniel.
38 See Maurice Hunt, “Ways of Knowing in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 30,
no. 1 (Winter 1979): 89-93.
108
choosing the lead casket. According to his distinctively Baconian approach, we must
mistrust decorousness, because the human imagination can and will misapprehend
knowledge communicated eloquently. But Portia argues here that decorousness is itself
subject to verification and falsification. She even proposes a science experiment, in which
we find a way to judge a nightingale’s song in the daytime. Portia’s method produces
knowledge about the world, and about how we know. In stark contrast, Bassanio’s
method assumes knowledge. When he enters a few lines after Portia’s speech about the
nightingale, he praises her beauty, saying, “We should hold day with the Antipodes, / If
you would walk in absence of the sun” (127-28). Edmond Malone glossed the line thus:
“If you would always walk in the night it would be day with us, as it now is on the other
side of the globe” (127-28n). Portia, Bassanio says, makes the night seem like the day. In
his calculus, she is not the nightingale but the daytime, the context that makes their
experience worthwhile. Bassanio praises her beauty in terms that he thinks are absolute
and objective. But Portia’s speech about the nightingale exposes its fallaciousness,
because she has just shown us that presumed, objective knowledge—especially the sort
associated with the romantic bliss of comedies—is always subject to experimental
falsification.
Once the truth about the rings comes out, we see a clash between Bassanio’s
method and Portia’s. Her method produces knowledge, while his assumes it; her method
employs creativity and the imagination to make hypothetical predictions, while his
mistrusts the imagination and relies on pure induction and plainness; her method
willingly exploits the rhetorical force of scientific discovery, while his cannot reconcile
109
knowing and persuading. Confronted with the consequences of giving up the ring,
Bassanio all but repeats the appeal Portia taught him at the end of the trial scene:
If you did know to whom I gave the ring
If you did know for whom I gave the ring,
And would conceive for what I gave the ring,
And how unwillingly I left the ring,
When naught would be accepted but the ring,
You would abate the strength of your displeasure. (193-98)
In a flurry of “if”s, Bassanio tries to convince Portia that if her knowledge were complete,
then she would not be so upset. He articulates the opposite of a hypothesis. Instead of
seeking to produce knowledge, he simply outlines the contingency on which the situation
supposedly rests, as if knowledge (and its discovery) were a contract with nature to be
executed inductively.
Portia’s response to this appeal often goes underappreciated, but it constitutes the
chief epistemological and dramatic moment of the play. Shakespeare makes manifest the
importance of the hypothesis latent in the new science:
If you had known the virtue of the ring,
Or half her worthiness that gave the ring,
Or your own honour to contain the ring,
You would not then have parted with the ring.
What man is there so much unreasonable
If you had pleased to have defended it
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With any terms of zeal, wanted the modesty
To urge the thing held as a ceremony?
Nerissa teaches me what to believe:
I’ll die for’t, but some woman had the ring! (199-208)
Bassanio gave away the ring, and in doing so exposes his own lack of knowledge, not to
mention his method’s failure to produce knowledge. He falsifies the ring test’s
hypothesis, and Portia turns his epistrophe (repetition at the end of lines) of “ring” against
him to assert how backwards his method has become. He should have concerned himself
with his own knowledge, not his wife’s. She presses the advantage in her rhetorical
question, which, like Shylock’s questions in his revenge speech, has an indicative force.
If you, Bassanio, had defended the ring with any zeal whatsoever, there is no one
unreasonable enough to take it. Bassanio’s response to this question/claim exposes the
deep flaw in his assumptions about knowledge: “No by my honour, madam, by my soul /
No woman had it, but a civil doctor” (209-10). Instead of using his imagination, he
resorts, as he has regularly done, to the evidence of his senses. Because he places no
value in hypothesis-driven science, he does not understand how and why the ring has
value, and he does not see the combined scientific and literary potential of the word “if.”
He does not and cannot know as well as Portia does. Once she admits that she played
Doctor Balthazar, Bassanio’s material predicament is resolved. He gets the ring back, and
happiness ensues—or, at the very least, Portia assures him she has not been unfaithful.39
39 See Karen Newman, “Portia’s Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The
Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 38, no. 1 (Winter 1987): 19-33.
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If this hasty resolution proves troubling (to Bassanio and to us), it is because
Shakespeare’s scene of knowledge, built upon contingency, leaves even the most certain
matrimonial feelings open to further testing—and falsification.
The Shylock Experiment
In one of the play’s plots, therefore, Shakespeare dramatizes a conflict of two
scientific methods. Between the casket experiment and the ring experiment comes the
trial scene, focal point of most readings of the play. It has become a critical commonplace
that Portia out-lawyers Shylock, beating him at his own legal game. Adelman writes that
most readers think Portia “triumphs over [Shylock] not via the mercy she invokes but
rather via her insistence that he adhere to the letter of the law.”40 Portia’s dominance over
the Jew, the argument goes, derives from her legal expertise. Engle broadens this claim,
arguing that Portia “establishe[s] her mastery over the systems of exchange in the play
which have routed all blessings, socioeconomic, erotic, and theological, toward
Belmont.”41 The scene’s final result is the unsettling repudiation of the religious and
cultural other, Shylock. Yet Portia’s legal, economic, and even religious advantages,
which we cannot deny, are scientifically driven. Portia “wins” in the trial scene not just
because she has what Engle calls “moral luck,” but because she employs her scientific
40 Adelman, Blood Relations, 109.
41 Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism, 97.
112
method on Shylock, just as she did on Morocco, Arragon, and Bassanio.42 Before she
ever has recourse to the law, the religious discourse of mercy, or the benefits of her
socioeconomic position, she has recourse to science. Insistent on his bond, Shylock
displays a surprising affinity to Bassanio and Bacon, particularly their way of seeking
knowledge. The trial scene thus becomes one final science experiment, in which Portia
makes and tests hypotheses that in turn produce knowledge—and lead to yet more
experiments. The religious other is punished because, as Shylock himself proposes, Portia
and the Venetians want to know the difference between a Christian and a Jew. They want
to know Shylock, and Portia’s experiment promises to show just that.
Shylock famously insists on his bond, proclaiming to the Duke that “if you deny
it, let the danger light / Upon the charter and your city’s freedom!” (4.1.38-39). He
articulates the same causal logic Antonio expressed earlier, that if the bond is denied, then
the state itself will be undermined (3.3.26-31). He is not wrong: his case against Antonio
seems watertight, and his contractual “if” once again works as the opposite of a
hypothesis. By no means does Shylock intend to test, either to verify or falsify, the
relationship he verbalizes. He cannot imagine a situation in which his bond is rejected
while the state’s justice remains credible, though just such a situation ultimately
overwhelms him. Anita Gilman Sherman reads the trial as a “tragic testament to
Shylock’s many refusals of knowledge,” but his absolute reliance on the bond’s certainty
42 On “moral luck” see Bernard Williams, Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers, 1973-1980
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981).
113
assumes too much knowledge.43 The same is true when he refuses to accept more money:
“If every ducat in six thousand ducats / Were in six parts, and every part a ducat, / I
would not draw them; I would have my bond” (4.1.85-88). Shylock speaks this “if” too as
a promise, not out of any desire to produce new knowledge. A few lines later, when
Bassanio offers ten times the amount due, he tests the hypothesis Shylock did not know
he made.
Shylock’s pre-trial dialogue with Bassanio takes Shakespeare’s scene of
knowledge and focuses it on Baconian new science. It is a little-noticed fact of the play
that we see Shylock and Bassanio converse only twice. Except for the thirty prose lines in
which Bassanio asks for three-thousand ducats (1.3.31), the bond negotiations of Act One
occur between Antonio and the Jew. From then until the trial scene, Bassanio and
Shylock never meet on stage, even though the former hires away the latter’s servant
Lancelot. Yet their mentalities appear quite similar: both state outright their dependence
on sensory data as the means by which they achieve knowledge—what would later be
called materialism. Avraham Oz reads Shylock’s as a mind that “persistently suppresses
any tendency toward a free play of the imagination as well as any notion that goes
beyond his materialistic world view,” a description that nicely fits Bassanio and Bacon as
well.44 Adelman sees Shylock as an “anatomist-inquisitor” who seeks to know by cutting
into things (Antonio in particular). This dual label applies, albeit unintentionally, to
Bacon, who, as we have seen, believed that the purpose of experimentation was not to
43 Sherman, “Disowning Knowledge,” 286.
44 Avraham Oz, “Sadness and Knowledge: The Exposition of The Merchant of Venice,” Assaph:
Studies in the Theatre 2 (1985): 67.
114
prove or disprove a hypothesis but to observe and inquire into the nature of the material
world.45 Shakespeare brings the two together in a brief exchange as the trial commences:
Bassanio
This is no answer, thou unfeeling man,
To excuse the current of thy cruelty.
Shylock
I am not bound to please thee with my answers.
Bassanio
Do all men kill the things they do not love?
Shylock
Hates any man the thing he would not kill?
Bassanio
Every offence is not a hate at first.
Shylock
What, wouldst thou have a serpent sting thee twice? (4.1.63-69)
Mahood notes that this stichomythia “catches the dramatic tension of a quasi-forensic
interrogation” (65-69n). The two men offer identical forms of argumentation for their
respective causes. Before legal deliberations even begin, they ask questions to make
rhetorical points.
When Portia enters disguised as Dr. Balthazar, the science experiment begins.
Shylock’s clinical trial begins before his legal trial does. As we saw in his revenge speech
and in his exchange with Bassanio, Shylock uses scientific ideas for a rhetorical purpose.
He understands, that is, the potential rhetorical force of scientific inquiry; that force
comes across powerfully in the revenge speech and in the opening moments of the trial.
But like Bassanio, he does not utilize the knowledge-producing power of the hypothesis.
45 In the context of Julia Lupton’s reading of the play, it seems worth pointing out the scientific
aspect of Shylock’s reliteralization of Paul’s metaphor of circumcision of the heart. Paul had taken the
physical sign of circumcision and internalized it—or de-materialized it beyond the scope of sensory
experience. What Shylock does—in a deeply Baconian way—is to make it outward and material and above
all observable once more. See Lupton, Citizen-Saints, 73-102.
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Portia’s much-discussed “quality of mercy” speech, by contrast, is hypothesis-based
science in action. Still insisting on the bond, Shylock asks the young doctor, “On what
compulsion must I [be merciful]?” (179). As she does with Morocco, Arragon, and
Bassanio, Portia places Shylock on a mental trajectory toward a response that will reveal
something about him:
The quality of mercy is not strained,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes.
′Tis mightiest in the mightiest, it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown …
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute of God himself,
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice. (180-85, 190-93)
To Shylock’s demand for “compulsion,” Portia replies that mercy is completely
unconditional and free of such compulsion. Engle writes that her speech “endorses
morally unconditioned action by citing the example of those loaded with constitutive
moral luck.”46 In other words, Portia claims that morality is free of luck or contingency,
but she does so from the position of one who has already benefited from luck.
Notwithstanding this socioeconomic advantage, however, it is her manipulation of
46 Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism, 104.
116
contingency—in the form of the hypothesis—that has loaded her so constitutively with
moral luck. She makes these claims about mercy not simply because she is wealthier by
far than every other character but because she has used (and will presumably continue to
use) her mastery of “if” to maintain that wealth.
Portia’s speech ends with an “if,” and Shylock’s response, like those of the suitors
in the casket test and Bassanio in the ring test, becomes measurable scientific data. We
very quickly see that the “quality of mercy” speech does not aim to persuade Shylock. It
aims to test him, so that Portia can measure his response. She winds up the speech with
what sounds like an appeal:
I have spoke thus much
To mitigate the justice of thy plea,
Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
Must needs give sentence ‘gainst the merchant there. (198-201)
If you follow through on your plea for justice, then the court must let you take Antonio’s
flesh. Two opposite readings of this moment have persisted. On one hand, we might
optimistically believe that Portia is genuinely trying to persuade Shylock to relent. On the
other hand, we might suspect that Portia knows she cannot persuade Shylock and thus is
simply baiting him so that she can turn justice back on him. But Shakespeare’s writing
suggests more complications than either of these options suggests. In the scene of
knowledge he has constructed, Portia does not presume to know Shylock’s motives—or
his worth. Shylock’s response, “My deeds upon my head! I crave the law, / The penalty
and forfeit of my bond” (202-3), works just as Morocco’s and Arragon’s responses did.
117
He specifies his absolute reliance on the organized contingency of the contract. In doing
so, he articulates an ethos of evaluation directly opposed to the forgiveness the Christians
expect. After this moment, it is over for him. Portia proceeds to give him what he claims
to want: she turns his deeds, along with the whole force of the law, on his head.
Just as she will do to Bassanio in Act Five, Portia turns Shylock’s knowledgeseeking method against him. Based on the “quality of mercy” experiment, Portia
knows—Shylock himself acknowledges, “you know the law” (233)—but this is not
enough. She dominates the rest of the trial scene not just because she knows but because
she knows how to know. Having elicited a self-condemning response from Shylock, she
dares Shylock to test her final three “if” statements, all of which point to legal
conditionality, as if they were hypotheses. In doing so, she shows Shylock the crucial
weakness of his use of “if.” Turning the tables, she promises:
if thou dost shed
One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods
Are by the laws of Venice confiscate
Unto the state of Venice. (305-8)
A few lines later, she predicts that “if thou tak’st more / Or less than a just pound …
Thou diest” (322-23, 328). Then, as Shylock suddenly becomes the defendant of a
criminal trial, she offers a final “if”:
If it be proved against an alien
That by direct or indirect attempts
He seek the life of a citizen. (344-46).
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The consequences of these “if”s are dire, because Shylock stands to lose everything based
on one or more of the conditions. Like Bassanio, he assumes knowledge and seems
hostile to its production through hypothetical means. Just as Bassanio thinks himself
“questionless” (1.1.175), Shylock declares he will “stay no longer question” (4.1.342).
Portia’s final “if”s, built upon scientifically-produced knowledge, assure the Jew, along
with the Venetian gentlemen, of her epistemological dominance. In a room full of
Bacons, Portia offers a powerful, if disturbing, demonstration of the modern scientific
method. Through her repudiation of Shylock, Shakespeare exposes all systems of
evaluation—legal, economic, religious—as susceptible to scientific falsification.
Within a plot of strangers, money, and revenge, Shakespeare offers a drama of
knowledge, with his various characters coming to embody certain ways of knowing:
Bassanio and Shylock as Bacon, and Portia as Galileo—or even Edison. The
epistemological conflict in Shakespeare’s Venice points to the playwright’s engagement
both with a large-scale cultural shift in the state of knowledge and with the more
immediate expression of that shift in Bacon’s writings. This exchange, as we have seen,
takes place by means of the word “if.” Whereas in Richard II Shakespeare spent the
remaining currency of reflexive language, in Merchant he inflates the value of “if” by
trading with it in a new way. He commits a kind of literary usury by taking dramatic
advantage of a word that, as Touchstone will explain in As You Like It, has the “virtue” of
great representational potential (5.4.101). Using “if,” Shakespeare creates a represented
world that appropriates Baconian science, exposes its omission of the hypothesis, holds
up the epistemological potential of imaginative writing, and in doing so anticipates the
119
history of science. If not a prophecy, Shakespeare makes, at the very least, an educated
guess.
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Chapter Three: The Medium is the Message of As You Like It
When he wrote As You Like It in 1599, the midpoint of his career, Shakespeare
was more well-known than ever. The new Globe was open, or was about to open.1 The
so-called War of the Theaters was heating up, and competition for playgoing audiences
was reaching an unprecedented intensity.2 A long view of the playwright’s career shows
us that 1599 marks a shift in Shakespeare’s generic interests from comedy and history to
tragedy. Yet it was his visibility in print that gave him the most meaningful boost, for he
began to compete in not one but several parts of the literary market. Indeed, as Erne and
others have argued, around the turn of the century Shakespeare acquired an interest not
merely in staging plays but in printing them too.3 According to Erne, he pursued this
interest by writing and revising plays with the print market in mind—he wrote for both
page and stage, as the formulation has it.
As we saw in the Introduction, this easy separation of page from stage masks a
complicated set of relationships at work in the literary marketplace. Perhaps the most
basic of these relationships is that between verse and prose, which Shakespeare inherited
from Marlowe and other earlier playwrights. Using verse for upper-class, serious, official
speech, and prose for lower-class, comic, unofficial speech was a theatrical
1 See James Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (New York: Harper
Collins, 2005).
2 James P. Bednarz, Shakespeare & the Poets’ War (New York: Columbia UP, 2001), 1-18. See
also Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1970).
3 Erne, Shakespeare As Literary Dramatist, 1-30 and 220-44.
121
commonplace.4 In many respects, this dual-media system grew out of representational
necessity. Partly as a result of the increasing sophistication of their audiences,
playwrights needed a linguistic means to portray the subtle varieties in their fictional
worlds.5 When he wrote As You Like It, Shakespeare had worked for a decade in this
bilingual theatrical economy, in which dramatists “construct[ed] playworld environments
that feature artful switching between verse and prose, often with the clear implication that
the characters themselves are not only conscious but fully responsible for choosing the
media they employ.”6 He had written great prose speakers such as Falstaff, Hal,
Benedick, Beatrice, and others, and he would soon write Hamlet and Iago. But As You
Like It is special, because in it Shakespeare’s prose and verse reveal his newly intense
interest in print.
The possibilities of print and the use of prose and verse come together, for
example, in Act Two of As You Like It, when Orlando and his exhausted servant Adam
4 S. S. Hussey notes that “the norm of [Shakespeare’s early] plays is obviously blank verse, and
Shakespeare’s authoritative characters—kings, dukes and leaders generally—for the most part use a verse
whose diction includes rather more than the average number of polysyllables and whose smooth flow
conceals a deliberate control of syntax. Members of the aristocracy, however, sometimes ‘relax or
condescend into prose’ … [which] appears to be used for special reasons of dramatic contrast.” See The
Literary Language of Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1992), 153. See also Douglas Bruster,
“The Politics of Shakespeare’s Prose,” in Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on
the Early Modern English Stage, ed. Bryan Reynolds and William N. West (New York: Palgrave, 2005),
95-114.
5 Jonas Barish writes about two representational problems that verse and prose helped solve: “the
first problem, and it was acute in the sixteenth century, was to find a rhetoric that could accomplish stage
dialogue clearly and economically. The second requirement was a rhetoric with enough potency of its own
to do the subtler things for which language exists in the theater—to convey gradations of feeling, to
establish atmosphere, and to suggest complexity of motivation.” See Jonas A. Barish, Ben Jonson and the
Language of Prose Comedy (New York: Norton, 1970), 8-9.
6 Bruster, “The Politics of Shakespeare’s Prose,” 103.
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appear onstage for a brief exchange. Adam says he is so hungry that he “die[s] for food.”7
Orlando responds with a promise to go find Adam something to eat, but then he changes
his mind and carries away the old man to seek shelter. Seen in dramatic performance, the
scene portrays a social superior serving his servant—exactly what we expect from
Orlando, who has himself suffered years of mistreatment at the hands of his older brother
Oliver. But there is a quality to the scene that theatergoers might miss. Below is the scene
as it appears in the First Folio (left) and in Michael Hattaway’s Cambridge edition
(right):8
[2.6] Enter ORLANDO and ADAM
ADAM Dear master, I can go no further. O, I
die for food. Here lie I down and measure out
my grave. Farewell, kind master.
ORLANDO Why, how now, Adam, no greater
heart in thee? Live a little, comfort a little,
cheer thyself a little. If this uncouth forest yield
anything savage I will either be food for it or
bring it for food to thee. Thy conceit is nearer
death than thy powers. For my sake be
comfortable; hold death awhile at the arm’s
end. I will here be with thee presently, and if I
bring thee not something to eat, I will give thee
leave to die; but if thou diest before I come,
thou art a mocker of my labour. Well said, thou
look’st cheerly, and I’ll be with thee quickly.
Yet thou liest in the bleak air. Come, I will bear
thee to some shelter and thou shalt not die for
lack of a dinner if there live anything in this
desert. Cheerly, good Adam.
Exeunt
Figure 2: As You Like It 2.6, in the First Folio and Hattaway’s Cambridge edition
7 Unless otherwise noted, citations of As You Like It come from As You Like It, ed. Juliet
Dusinberre (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006).
8 As You Like It, ed. Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000).
123
The difference here lies in the line breaks: the words in each edition are identical, but
their placement is not. The Folio prints the whole scene as a kind of uneven verse, while
Hattaway rearranges every line as prose. Editors since Alexander Pope have made the
whole scene prose because, in Horace Howard Furness’s words, “the last line of this
Scene is, in the Folio, the last line of the page, and … the division into verse … is due
simply to the effort of the compositors to spread out the lines in order to avoid the
necessity of having the heading of [the next] Scene at the foot of the page.”9 In other
words, the Folio printers turned what was a prose scene into verse to fill up space on the
page. And they seem to have been quite untroubled about doing so.
Such an apparently insignificant editorial choice can show us a great deal about
As You Like It, and about Shakespeare’s writing practice. The ease with which the
compositors evidently chopped prose into verse suggests the flexibility of the two
discursive media on the printed page. This is not to say that the distinction between prose
and verse collapses altogether. Rather, we see the extent to which printers, like
playwrights, employed the two media as instruments of presentation. This flexibility
persists in modern editions: Juliet Dusinberre reedits Adam’s speech as “free verse” and
turns Orlando’s first line, “Why, how now, Adam? No greater heart in thee?” into a blank
verse line (2.6.5). She does so on the assumption that “the exhausted Adam speaks in free
verse (as in F) and that Orlando’s first line is a verse response, quickly turning to
informal prose … for the encouragement of his servant” (2.6n). Prose, she reasons, is the
proper discursive medium in which Orlando—a social superior speaking informally to an
9 Quoted in As You Like It, ed. Richard Knowles (New York: MLA, 1977), 109-10.
124
inferior—would address Adam. Dusinberre’s rationale draws upon her insight that more
than Shakespeare’s other plays, As You Like It “oscillates between verse and a lucid,
expressive prose which is never far removed from the rhythms of poetry, necessitating
difficult discriminations by editors ….”10 The scene thus reveals the flexibility of prose
and verse, a quality that auditors in the theater may notice but that readers can see and
measure for themselves.
The literary world of London in which Shakespeare wrote this scene was a
formally multifaceted one, in which a huge variety of genres, prose and verse writing
styles, modes of address, and subject matters circulated in theatrical, print, and
manuscript venues. To this copious marketplace, Shakespeare offers a copious response
in As You Like It. A reflection of its literary context, the play is filled with verse forms
and prose styles, with genres and allusions, and with meaningful textual problems, all of
which are most fully comprehensible on the printed page. This chapter shows how
Shakespeare, having written a drama of the self in Richard II and a drama of knowledge
in The Merchant of Venice, writes in As You Like It a drama of print. In spite of the
critical history of the play, which sees it as one of Shakespeare’s most metatheatrical, we
fully understand As You Like It when we read it. The written medium of the play becomes
its message, a fact that helps explain why nothing seems to happen in it. The how of this
bare-plotted play—all the ways of speaking and writing—becomes the what—the very
subject in question. Once we see that nothing happens in the plot because everything is
10 Dusinberre, Introduction to As You Like It (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006), 8.
125
happening in the forms, the styles, and the text, the Forest of Arden suddenly comes alive
as a literary marketplace in itself.
The longstanding questions about As You Like It—“Why doesn’t anything seem
to happen?” and “What is this play about?”—make sense in the context of Shakespeare’s
other plays. Much Ado About Nothing, for example, written only a year before, contains
an exciting plot in which the audience is expected to feel a stake. By contrast, as William
Hazlitt remarked long ago, in As You Like It “it is not what is done, but what is said, that
claims our attention.”11 Similarly, Anne Barton points out that the plot “barely exists,”12
elsewhere calling the play a “structure of cunningly juxtaposed characters and attitudes
which Shakespeare has elaborated until it becomes a substitute for plot.”13 Writing about
Shakespeare’s prose in particular, Brian Vickers called the play one “in which Plot has
been almost forgotten in the cause of Wit.”14 To deal with this puzzling lack of action,
critics have understandably claimed that the play must be about itself—it must, that is, be
11 Quoted in Alan Brissenden, Introduction to As You Like It (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998), 46.
Brissenden goes on: “the central acts of the play particularly have a static character, the action is all in the
words and the brilliant play of wit they convey.” Michael Hattaway makes the similar point that “apart
from the set-pieces of the wrestling, the song (and dance?) after the killing of the deer (4.2), and the
masque and dance at the end of the play, it is mainly a play of talk and song, a feast of language.” See
Michael Hattaway, Introduction to As You Like It, 13.
12 Quoted in Richard Wilson, “‘Like the Old Robin Hood’: As You Like It and the Enclosure
Riots,” Shakespeare Quarterly 43, no. 1 (1992): 4.
13 Anne Barton, Introduction to As You Like It, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore
Evans, 1st ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 365.
14 Vickers goes on: “The nature of the prose of As You Like It supports the general point that the
play is static rather than dynamic, for no other play contains as many witty set-speeches (even the comic
confrontations result not in developments of the plot nor in insights into character but in still more setspeeches), and in no other play are logic and rhetoric used so brilliantly, albeit as static solo performances.”
See The Artistry of Shakespeare’s Prose (London: Methuen, 1968), 200.
126
metatheatrical.15 As a result, the performative quality of gender has been the most
discussed topic of the play for over thirty years, and has generated great insight into the
play and into early modern culture.16 The play, we are told, can only be comprehended
when we see its theatrical nature. This chapter argues that the opposite is also true: we
cannot fully comprehend what Shakespeare is doing in As You Like It without seeing its
deep printedness.
A Multimedia Market
Shakespeare wrote As You Like It in a dynamic literary marketplace partly of his
own making. The 1590s witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of genres, writing
styles, and narratives in various formats. It was a decade of satire: the Marprelate
controversy (1588-89) ushered in a new period of “railing” language, and the 1599
Bishops’ Ban on satires capped that period with the suggestion that satire had become a
major literary force.17 It was a decade of prose fiction: the long popularity of Lyly’s
Euphues (1578) gave way to that of Philip Sidney’s masterwork, The Countess of
Pembroke’s Arcadia (1590), and both of these best-sellers inspired many prose works,
including Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde (1590), Shakespeare’s source for As You Like It,
15 For a good example of a metatheatrical reading of the play, see Brian Gibbons, Shakespeare
and Multiplicity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), 153-81.
16 For example, see Jean E. Howard, “Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early
Modern England,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39, no. 4 (1988): 418-40; Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the
Nature of Women, 2nd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996); and Clare R. Kinney, “Feigning Female
Faining: Spenser, Lodge, Shakespeare, and Rosalind,” Modern Philology 95, no. 3 (February 1998): 291315.
17 See Joseph Black, Introduction to The Martin Marprelate Tracts: A Modernized and Annotated
Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008), xxv-xxxiv.
127
which was a “no”-seller. It was a decade in which the theater earned Lyly’s appellation
“hodge-podge” for its variety of language and dramatic intrigue, and in which
competition between rival companies and playwrights became so fierce that at least one
play, the collaborative Isle of Dogs, was burned.18 And it was a decade in which print
offered access to a huge array of writings of every sort, including many playtexts.19
Writers, printers, theaters, genres, styles, and literary forms sizzled in competition and
collaboration, and this activity was at its height in 1599. In this context, As You Like It’s
formal patchwork fits right into the equally patchy marketplace.20
The 1599 Bishops’ Ban, to which Celia probably refers in Act One of
Shakespeare’s play, registers the extent of this quality in the literary marketplace.
Whatever its motivations, the Ban offers a sample of the diversity of writing forms
available in print at the turn of the century. It also shows the political and religious
potency of those forms. The basic facts are rather simple: on June 1, 1599, the Stationers’
Company received orders from John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Richard
Bancroft, Bishop of London, that prevented further publication of certain named works
(including, for example, Christopher Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s Elegies). The ban
18 See Bednarz, Shakespeare & the Poets’ War, 1-18.
19 See Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, “The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited,”
Shakespeare Quarterly 56, no. 1 (2005): 1-32; and Peter W. M. Blayney, “The Alleged Popularity of
Playbooks,” Shakespeare Quarterly 56, no. 1 (2005): 33-50.
20 Cf. Andrew Barnaby about As You Like It: “Shakespeare does indeed address the peculiar
historical circumstances of late-Elizabethan culture, and that engagement is evidenced in the formal
elements of his play.” See “The Political Conscious of Shakespeare’s As You Like It,” SEL: Studies in
English Literature, 1500-1900 36, no. 2 (1996): 375. On plays as patchwork, see Tiffany Stern, Documents
of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), 1-7. On the literary
marketplace, see my Introduction and Douglas Bruster, “The Representational Market of Early Modern
England,” forthcoming.
128
also ordered that “noe Satyres or Epigramms be printed hereafter,” and that “noe
Englishe historyes bee printed” unless authorized by the Privy Council. The order also
mandated “that noe playes bee printed excepte they bee allowed by suche as have
aucthorytie.”21 Three days later, certain books named in the Ban were burned.
For most of the twentieth century, scholars operated under the belief that the Ban
aimed to control public morality by preventing lascivious texts from entering the
marketplace. Later scholars revised that belief, arguing that the Ban attempted to stamp
out satire’s threat to the social order. The “railing” of the satirist destabilizes society and
must therefore be silenced.22 More recent scholarship, noting that previous accounts of
the Ban do not satisfactorily explain all of its aspects, has suggested that the bishops were
responding to the increased predominance of “embodied writing,” texts and genres that
share a surprising frankness concerning the body.23 Finally, in contrast to these broadbased arguments about the Ban, Cyndia Clegg has argued that Archbishop Whitgift
issued the order specifically to address the political crisis surrounding the Earl of Essex
and his ill-fated trip to Ireland.24 These differing explanations do not necessarily cancel
out each other. The Ban could have been motivated by a desire to control public decency,
21 Quoted in Richard A. McCabe, “Elizabethan Satire and the Bishops’ Ban of 1599,” Yearbook
of English Studies 11 (1981): 188.
22 Ibid., 188-93.
23 See Lynda E. Boose, “The 1599 Bishops’ Ban, Elizabethan Pornography, and the Sexualization
of the Jacobean Stage,” in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed.
Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1994), 185-200; and Douglas Bruster,
Shakespeare and the Question of Culture: Early Modern Literature and the Cultural Turn (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 65-93 and 233-34.
24 See Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1997), 198-217. See also Richard Dutton, Licensing, Censorship, and Authorship in Early Modern
England: Buggeswords (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 53.
129
protect the social order against the destabilizing force of satire, protect the Earl of Essex’s
image, and curb the rise of embodied writing. It is fairly easy to see how this could be the
case, especially considering that bishops Whitgift and Bancroft had been personally
involved in the Marprelate controversy, which had already connected the dots between
satire, public morality, bodily openness, and topical reference.25
The Ban is thus overdetermined in its multiple layers of causation, and in the
broadest sense it shows us just how potent various writing and speaking styles could be.
However complex its motivations, the Ban attempts to subvert the rising authority of
writers across a range of media and genres. Below are listed the texts, both specific books
and categories, prohibited or suppressed by the Ban:
25 See Black, Introduction to The Martin Marprelate Tracts, lxxiv-xciv.
130
Author and Title
Main formal features
Joseph Hall’s Virgidemiarum (1597, 1598)
John Marston’s Metamorphosis of
Pygmalion’s Image (1598)
Marston's Scourge of Villanie (1598)
Thomas Middleton's Microcynicon (1598)
Thomas Cutwood's Caltha Poetarum
(1599)
Edward Guilpin's Skialethia (1598)
Mostly couplets
First in six-line stanzas rhyming
ABABCC, then in couplets
Mostly couplets
Mostly couplets
Seven line stanzas rhyming ABABBCC
Torquato and Ercole Tasso’s Of Marriage
and Wiving (1599)
15 Joys of Marriage
John Davies’ Epigrams (n.d.)
Marlowe's Elegies (in the same book as
Davies's epigrams)
Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey’s books
History plays, along with plays generally
Lyrics of various lengths, sometimes in
rhyming couplets, other times in ABAB
Prose dialogues about marriage
A translation of Antoine La Sale’s Quinze
Joyes de Mariage of which there is no
extant 1590s edition. There is a 1507
version in verse—some stanzas
ABABBCC, later in couplets. There is also
a 1603 version all in prose, sometimes
attributed to Thomas Dekker.
Mostly quatrains rhyming ABAB, with
some couplets in the last two lines of
stanzas
Couplets
Almost completely prose
Various kinds of prose and verse
Table 1: Texts Banned or Censored by the 1599 Bishops’ Ban
Texts considered dangerous—either to public morality, to the social order, or to specific
individuals like Essex—come in all sorts. This is not to suggest that the Ban covers all
aspects of the literary marketplace, but that those aspects it does cover are not limited to
one discursive medium or another. A writer could satirize in more than one venue, such
as the theater, the printshop, and manuscript circles; in more than one genre or form, such
131
as prose dialogue, prose fiction, and verse of various sorts; and with more than one
purpose, such as to target specific individuals or broader social issues. In its response to a
single kind of writing, the Ban shows us with surprising efficiency the variegated
conditions of writing and reading in 1599.
Not least because As You Like It probably alludes to it, the Bishops’ Ban sheds
light on the relationship of Shakespeare’s play to the literary market. One of the more
vexing questions about the play—its date of composition and first performance—also
points us to its formally multifaceted qualities. Scholars who attempt to date the play
work with a perplexing set of circumstantial evidence. First, on August 4, 1600, the play
was listed in the Register of the Stationers’ Company as a play to be “stayed,” or
prevented from publication, along with Much Ado, Henry V, and Ben Jonson’s Every
Man in His Humour. Unlike the other three plays, which appeared shortly thereafter in
quarto, As You Like It was not published until the First Folio. This document establishes
August 1600 as the terminus ad quem for the play. Second, the play was not listed by
Francis Meres in September 1598 in his list of plays praising Shakespeare, suggesting
that date as a terminus a quo. Third, the play seems to allude to the Ban in Celia’s line,
“For since the little wit that fools have was silenced, the little foolery that wise men have
makes great show” (1.2.87-89). Fourth, the play seems to refer to notorious literary
figures and trends, including Jonson (in the figure of Jaques), the Queen’s godson Sir
John Harrington (also in Jaques), Essex (in the play’s narrative of pastoral exile), and the
vogue for satire. It also alludes to Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, along with several other
texts printed in the mid to late 1590s. Indeed, Arden is filled with poets, contemporary,
132
medieval, and classical.26 Fifth, the play seems to refer to or make use of Shakespeare’s
writing situation around 1599: Jaques’ famous “All the world’s a stage” speech seems to
refer to the Globe’s motto, and the part of Touchstone seems fitting either as Kempe’s
final performance or Armin’s first one.27 Sixth, the song in 5.3, “It was a lover and his
lass,” was printed in The First Book of Airs (1600) of the songwriter Thomas Morley,
meaning that either Morley took the lyric from Shakespeare or (more likely) Shakespeare
borrowed it from Morley. Finally, Juliet Dusinberre has argued that As You Like It was
the nameless play performed at court on Shrove Tuesday, February 20, 1599, and that a
manuscript verse epilogue copied down after that performance fits Shakespeare’s play
perfectly.28 Based on this and other circumstantial evidence, most scholars and editors
date the play sometime in 1599-1600, most often in the second half of 1599.29
This evidence, however circumstantial, shows us just how deeply imbricated in
the literary marketplace As You Like It is. Every piece of evidence for the play’s date,
understood as a point of contact with the world outside the text, connects the play with
different writing styles, genres, venues, and discursive media. The August 4th staying
order places As You Like It in relation to a similar comedy in Much Ado, a history play,
and a satirical comedy by another rival/peer playwright. Meres’ list is one of favorite
26 See Juliet Dusinberre, “Rival Poets in the Forest of Arden,” Shakespeare-Jahrbuch 139 (2003):
71-83.
27 Tiffany Stern, “Was Totus Mundus Agit Histrionem Ever the Motto of the Globe Theatre?”
Theatre Notebook 51, no. 3 (1997): 122-27.
28 See Juliet Dusinberre, “Pancakes and a Date for As You Like It,” Shakespeare Quarterly 54, no.
4 (2003): 371-405. Michael Hattaway emphasizes that all of the evidence for dating the play is
circumstantial. See “Dating As You Like It, Epilogues and Prayers, and the Problems of ‘As the Dial Hand
Tells O’er,’” Shakespeare Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2009): 154-67.
29 For a detailed summary of this evidence, see As You Like It, ed. Knowles, 353-82. See also As
You Like It, ed. Brissenden, 1-5; and As You Like It, ed. Hattaway, 62-63.
133
plays, carrying with it the notion of aesthetic judgment, which was always a hot topic in
the highly competitive 1590s. Meres claims that “As Plautus and Seneca are accounted
the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latines: so Shakespeare among [the]
English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage”; he praises Shakespeare
specifically for writing in more than one genre.30 Celia’s line about the Bishops’ Ban
suggests that if the Ban suppresses discourse in one arena, it will pop up in another—the
“little wit” of fools becomes the “little foolery” of wise men in the “great show” of the
theater. Moreover, the play’s huge range of textual reference is almost all literary in
nature, while Jaques’ speech, Morley’s song, and the alleged court epilogue are
connected with the worlds of the public theater, music, and court drama respectively. As
You Like It is thus steeped in the literary culture of its moment, for it integrates various
media and formats, along with such issues as piracy, cash flow, and the political potency
of style. Whether Shakespeare wrote it before or after the Bishops’ Ban of June 1, 1599,
therefore, the play is drawing upon the very literary qualities that Bishops Whitgift and
Bancroft were trying to suppress.
A Mixed Media Play
This deep imbrication in the literary marketplace shows that in addition to our
usual sense that As You Like It is Shakespeare’s most theater-conscious play, it is also his
most print-conscious play. Brian Gibbons very nearly captures this point when he argues
30 Quoted in Knowles, 365.
134
that in the play “many forms of utterance, copious, curt, artless, elaborate, fantastic,
curmudgeonly, formally oratorical or nonsensical, are displayed for their delightfulness
and variety,” but he misses the mark when he adds that “each [form of utterance] is
subjected to the process of contrast and comparison which informs Shakespeare’s whole
idea of the theatre in As You Like It.”31 It is not simply Shakespeare’s “idea of the
theatre,” but his sense of the whole representational economy that subjects various forms
of speech and writing to comparison. And that process works on the printed page,
particularly in Shakespeare’s use of prose and verse. Notwithstanding the many editorial
problems the play presents—and often precisely because of them—the printed text of the
play completes what Shakespeare’s “idea of the theatre” begins.
And yet a printed text of As You Like It is exactly what we do not have—at least
not an early quarto, about which we can only speculate. Despite the staying order of
August 4, 1600, which suggested that the play would eventually be printed along with the
other “stayed” plays, As You Like It did not appear until 1623. Many reasons have been
proposed for why the play was not printed: censorship, fear of censorship, concern that
the play would not sell well (especially alongside Much Ado’s 1600 quarto), the fact that
Lodge’s Rosalynde was still available and told nearly the same story, or the possibility
that the play was only performed at court.32 Whatever the reason, we are left to wonder
what an early text of Shakespeare’s play would have looked like, and how a book
shopper in St. Paul’s churchyard would have encountered it. Like the Much Ado quarto,
31 Gibbons, Shakespeare and Multiplicity, 176-77.
32 See Knowles, 353-64 and Brissenden, Introduction to As You Like It, 1-5.
135
an As You Like It quarto doubtless would have featured Shakespeare’s name on the title
page. It would have mentioned the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, who had presumably acted
it—publicly, privately, or both. It might have featured some of the play’s selling points,
perhaps including a reference to Touchstone’s clowning or Jaques’ railing. But unlike the
Much Ado quarto, the first twenty pages of which show almost nothing but prose
speeches, the As You Like It quarto would have offered a visual display of all kinds of
forms—prose and verse, couplets visible by the similarity of their rhyming words, songs
and jigs, an epilogue and perhaps a prologue, short lines and long set speeches. This
imaginary book, like the Folio’s text of the play, would have materialized the play’s
formal copiousness in a way the theater could not. In other words, the play’s formal
richness, which a theatrical spectator and auditor would undoubtedly have noticed,
crystallizes only on the printed page.
In her Arden edition of the play, Dusinberre dedicates an entire section of the
Introduction to the way “aspects of the First Folio text suggest a wooing of the attention
and delight of a reader as opposed to a playgoer” (115). Noting that the play is “rich in
internal stage directions which help readers to visualize the action,” that much of the
wordplay is too fast for a theater audience to notice, and that in many ways “an imagined
Arden [is] even more beautiful than one represented in the theatre,” Dusinberre offers a
glimpse of what it means to say that As You Like It is Shakespeare’s drama of print, fully
comprehensible only when read. Of course we can and do appreciate the play in
performance, but focusing exclusively on theatrical performance, when the play is so
firmly implicated in a wider literary market, leads to the incomplete and unsatisfying
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conclusion that Arden is only a meta-theatrical forest. Shakespeare’s fraught use of prose
and verse, whose full extent only a reader can see, shows that the play’s literary
copiousness is revealed by its printed text as much as its theatrical representation.
Shakespeare, increasingly aware of the richness of the reading experience, registers the
extent to which theatrical performance constitutes a limiting act of interpretation. Every
performance forecloses other possible meanings. By contrast, as a printed play, As You
Like It is filled with perpetually ambiguous forms both strange and familiar. Its plot may
be uneventful, but literary creatures are performing a competition on its very pages. The
page reprinted here from the folio text, for example, features Rosalind’s prose pining
over Orlando (4.1), a song about killing a deer (4.2), blank verse exchange between
Rosalind and the shepherds, Phoebe’s verse letter to Rosalind, and finally Rosalind’s
prose mocking of Phoebe’s verse.
137
Figure 3: Excerpt from the First Folio, sig. R5v
138
One might object that, as in the short exchange between Orlando and Adam that
started this chapter, much of the play’s prose and verse is subject to the interference of
Heminges and Condell, as well as scribes, compositors, as others. Three answers may be
made to this objection, and they prove instructive as we begin to look at the play’s text.
First, the troubling of the prose/verse distinction occurs throughout the play. If indeed an
editorial agent is responsible for many or all of these passages, then the text of As You
Like It would stand above the rest of the First Folio plays as by far the most corrupt.
Probably several agents did intervene in the text, but this only argues that the text (or
texts) Shakespeare wrote already contained a distinct use of discursive media, which
editors recapitulated. Second, as we will see, in addition to the many perplexing uses of
prose and verse there are all sorts of literary forms. The prose and verse jumble in the text
fits perfectly alongside this variegated literary trove. Finally, the play shows a remarkable
self-consciousness about how one speaks and writes, to the extent that everyone in the
Forest of Arden is thinking about how everyone else is speaking or writing. When
Phoebe falls in love with Rosalind/Ganymede, for example, the first thing she notices is
that he “talks well” and that his “words do well” (3.5.111-12). Orlando explains that the
principle of decorum led him to enter Duke Senior’s camp shouting and waving his
sword around: he “thought that all things had been savage here / And therefore put I on
the countenance / Of stern commandment” (2.7.108-10). And later, when Orlando enters
and addresses Rosalind/Ganymede with the blank verse line, “Good day and happiness,
dear Rosalind,” Jaques objects, “Nay then, God b’wi’ you an you talk in blank verse”
(4.1.27-29).
139
This last example points us to the text itself, where Shakespeare uses prose and
verse in a way many critics have observed but never explained very well. George Wright
describes how “from a formal point of view, the most notable aspect of Shakespeare’s
prose is that it is often hard to distinguish from verse”—a feature most pronounced in As
You Like It. Wright goes on to explain that because “prose may turn iambic, just as verse,
with its manifold variant resources, may take a step in the direction of prose,” the
verse/prose distinction “is not so absolute as we are likely to think it.”33 This mediablending does not, however, mean that prose and verse lose their meaning as
representational categories. James Bednarz may be right that “one of the most striking
paradoxes of As You Like It is that that most seemingly natural literary kind is also the
most artificial,” but that paradox cannot rob prose and verse of their potency and
mutually defined characteristics.34 Shakespeare pushes incredibly hard on the theater’s
prose/verse bilingualism, but the two media do remain distinct, if not always
distinguishable. More important for the argument of this chapter, Shakespeare troubles
the prose/verse distinction in a way especially visible to readers. This flexibility creates
dozens, even hundreds, of difficult editorial problems as editors must decide which lines
should be prose, which verse, and which somewhere in between. Since no theatrical
performance could capture these ambivalences at work in the play, Shakespeare must
have written As You Like It with the possibilities of print foremost in his mind.
33 George Wright, Shakespeare’s Metrical Art (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988), 109, 113.
34 Bednarz, Shakespeare & the Poets’ War, 107. Bruster notes that many plays during the War of
the Theaters “offered winking acknowledgments not just of their artificiality but of how that artificiality
worked in and through language.” See “The Politics of Shakespeare’s Prose,” 103.
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The play contains many conventional modulations from verse to prose and vice
versa.35 These switches often mark a shift in dramatic tone, and they often occur when a
new character enters or exits the scene. In Act One, for instance, before the exile to
Arden, Rosalind and Celia engage in a playful prose exchange, wrestling jokes included:
Celia: Come, come, wrestle with thy affections.
Rosalind: O, they take the part of a better wrestler than myself.
Celia: O, a good wish upon you! You will try in time in despite of a fall. But
turning these jests out of service, let us talk in good earnest. Is it possible
on such a sudden you should fall into so strong a liking with old Sir
Rowland’s youngest son? (1.3.20-27)
A few lines later, though, Celia’s father Duke Frederick enters “with his eyes full of
anger” and interrupts the prose with verse (37).
Duke Frederick:
Mistress, dispatch you with your safest haste
And get you from our court.
Rosalind:
Me, uncle?
Duke Frederick:
You, cousin.
Within these ten days if that you be’st found
So near our public court as twenty miles,
Thou diest for it. (38-42)
35 Some examples include 3.4.42; 4.1.27ff; 4.3.74; 4.3.159ff; 5.2.73ff; 5.4.35.
141
Rosalind goes on to defend herself in verse, claiming that “Never so much as in a thought
unborn / Did I offend your highness” (48-49). Marjorie Garber notes that “the shift from
prose to verse … underscores the sudden change from intimacy to formality.”36 More
interesting than the fact that Frederick enters speaking verse is that Rosalind switches
media too, literally without missing a beat. That her “Me, uncle?” continues the Duke’s
blank verse line may undermine the force of her self-defense, because she acknowledges
the possibility of a disconnect between thoughts and words. Just as she will later clothe
herself as Ganymede, she clothes her speech as verse instead of the prose she was just
speaking, and thus Frederick’s response, “Thus do all traitors [speak],” is not necessarily
unjust.
The play also features dozens of verse moments that modulate into prose. Several
scenes begin with what reads like a verse line that then gets followed by prose, as in the
first lines of the play’s second scene:
Celia: I PRAY thee, ROSalind, SWEET my COZ, be MERRY.
Rosalind: Dear Celia, I show more mirth than I am mistress of.
(1.2.1-2, capitals mark metrical stress)
Rosalind, for whom verse is “a medium quite uncongenial to her satirical humour,”
refuses Celia’s encouraging verse with a falling “Dear Celia.”37 As in the exchange with
Frederick, Rosalind points to the disjunction between her appearance and her actual
condition, and her medium switch corresponds to that disjunction. She may look like
36 Quoted in 38n.
37 Milton Crane, Shakespeare’s Prose (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1951), 103.
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verse, but she feels like prose. Usually Touchstone’s wit provides the pin that punctures
verse:
Rosalind:
Alas, poor shepherd, searching of thy wound
I have by hard adventure found mine own.
Touchstone: And I mine. I remember when I was in love I broke my sword upon a
stone and bid him take that for coming a-night to Jane Smile. (2.4.41-45)
It is as if the clown is reminding Rosalind that her love-wound belongs less to the verse
world of the shepherds and more to the critical-comic world of people who pretend to be
shepherds. He reminds her, in other words, that she is an impostor, albeit a paradoxically
sincere one.
John Dover Wilson notoriously argued that Shakespeare originally composed
several scenes in As You Like It in verse and then turned them to prose.38 His main
evidence for this claim was a set of what he called “verse fossils,” or fragments of text
that have an iambic rhythm and possibly even form a pentameter line. Even though
Milton Crane thoroughly demolished this argument, Wilson’s observations are
nevertheless fascinating in light of this chapter’s concerns.39 What he calls “verse fossils”
are yet further examples of the play’s mixing of prose and verse. In the wrestling scene,
for example, Duke Frederick addresses Rosalind and Celia in what reads like prose:
38 These scenes are 1.2, 2.4, 4.3, and 5.2. See As You Like It, ed. Arthur Quiller-Couch and J.
Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1926).
39 See Crane, Shakespeare’s Prose, 203-8.
143
Duke Frederick: How now, daughter—and cousin. Are you crept hither to see the
wrestling?
Rosalind: Ay, my liege, so please you give us leave.
Duke Frederick: You will take little delight in it, I can tell you; there is such odds
in the man. (1.2.147-51)
As theater auditors, we may or may not notice that Rosalind’s line approaches iambic
pentameter. But the printed text encourages just this observation, and we are invited to
ask why this character would switch media at this particular moment. Her formality
would seem to be a chilly response to the Duke’s condescending “are you crept,” and it
explains why the Duke thinks the women will “take little delight in it.” Here as
elsewhere, such “verse fossils,” or what we might more properly call “iambic prose”
lines, carry greater representational value than the ordinary explanation for prose and
verse might suggest.40 More than simply reflecting a shift in the scene, they actually bring
it about.
Just as Shakespeare smuggles iambic lines into prose passages, he sometimes
introduces prose lines—or lines that cannot be read as verse—into verse contexts.
Perhaps the most common such prose nuggets are the short lines sprinkled throughout As
You Like It’s dialogue. Typically these lines serve the needs of a punchy exclamation or
question, as in Rosalind’s “Why, whither shall we go?” (1.3.103) and “But what will you
be called?” (123), both of which occur in otherwise blank verse exchanges. These lines
40 Other examples include, but are by no means limited to, 1.3.28; 2.4.9; 2.4.58-59; 3.2.67;
5.1.10-11; 5.2.104.
144
remain largely unobjectionable as part of a verse scene, but they nevertheless expand the
play’s verse/prose flexibility. As most readers will have recognized, Shakespeare, along
with his contemporaries, frequently combines two or three short, iambic speeches into a
single pentameter line. The exchange cited earlier from Rosalind and Duke Frederick
provides a good example:
And get you from our court.
Rosalind:
Me, uncle?
Duke Frederick:
You, cousin. (1.3.39)
Short lines throw a wrench in this conventional scheme, because they can leave us
uncertain of where we are on the verse/prose spectrum.41 For example, in the verse scene
which Orlando interrupts with his sword drawn, Duke Senior addresses Jaques in a short
line, “What, you look merrily” (2.7.11) and later asks him, “What fool is this?” (35).
Jaques begins his defense of satire with the short line, “Why, who cries out on pride?”
(70). None of these iambic lines fits into a longer, pentameter line, a fact that does not
seem to matter much until Orlando interrupts with a shout:
Orlando: Forbear and eat no more!
Jaques: Why, I have ate none yet. (88-89)
The two-line exchange seems unclassifiable as prose or verse. It does not fit in with the
blank verse that surrounds it, but it has a noticeably iambic rhythm. Jaques’ response
mocks Orlando’s in cadence and content, the rhythm of “Why, I have ATE none YET”
41 In their Folio-based Modern Library edition, Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen do not space
out continuous verse, partly because of this uncertainty. See William Shakespeare: Complete Works, ed.
Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (New York: Modern Library, 2007).
145
mimicking “ForBEAR and EAT no MORE!” The two lines become a short-line skip in
the flow of the scene’s verse. The printed page itself shows us the importance of this
interruption, even as it literally reshapes our understanding of prose and verse.
The various troublings of the prose/verse distinction surveyed above, which are
more easily accessible to the reader than the spectator, create a host of editorial problems.
Editors are forced to make judgments about what text to print in what medium, what lines
to make continuous verse and what to make prose. In Act Two, Scene Four, for example,
we find this exchange:
146
Rosalind:
Alas, poor shepherd, searching of thy wound
I have by hard adventure found mine own.
Touchstone: And I mine. I remember when I was
in love I broke my sword upon a stone and bid
him take that for coming a-night to Jane Smile;
and I remember the kissing of her batlet, and the
cow’s dugs that her pretty chopped hands had
milked; and I remember the wooing of a peascod
instead of her, from whom I took two cods, and,
giving her them again, said with weeping tears:
‘Wear these for my sake.’ We that are true lovers
run into strange capers. But as all is mortal in
nature, so is all nature in love mortal in folly.
Rosalind: Thou speak’st wiser than thou art ware
of.
Touchstone: Nay, I shall ne’er be ware of mine
own wit till I break my shins against it.
Rosalind:
Jove, Jove, this shepherd’s passion
Is much upon my fashion!
Touchstone: And mine, but it grows something
stale with me.
Celia:
I pray you, one of you question yon man
If he for gold will give us any food.
I faint almost to death.
Touchstone: Holla, you clown!
Rosalind: Peace, fool, he’s not thy kinsman.
Corin: Who calls?
Touchstone: Your betters, sir.
Corin: Else are they very wretched.
Figure 4: As You Like It, 2.4.41-67, in the First Folio and Dusinberre’s Arden edition
The differences are minute but meaningful. First, as we have already seen, Touchstone
intervenes with prose in Rosalind’s (presumably) blank verse speech, effecting a shift in
tone. Even though Rosalind’s first line (“Alas, poor shepherd …”) runs to the end of the
column as a prose line would, its iambic beat makes verse seem more likely. To
Touchstone’s long prose speech, Rosalind responds in a nine-syllable line that reads and
147
sounds like prose—“Thou speak’st wiser than thou art ware of”—and again, a reader but
not a spectator can pause over these distinctions.
But here the matter gets complicated. Touchstone responds with what most
editors print as a prose line, following the Folio’s lineation: “Nay, I shall ne’er be ware of
mine own wit till I break my shins against it” (54-55). But why is this speech necessarily
in prose? “Wit” and “it” rhyme, and if we break the line at “wit,” then we have an iambic
pentameter line (“Nay, I shall NE’ER be WARE of MINE own WIT”) and an eightsyllable trochaic line (TILL i BREAK my SHINS aGAINST it). We might argue that this
couplet fits perfectly with what Touchstone is saying, because in the second line he
“breaks” metrically what he set up in the first line—not quite the metrical feet but
definitely the shins. The fact that Rosalind responds with a shortened couplet of her own
would seem to support this claim, for she may be reappropriating Touchstone’s
playfulness for her own expressive needs. Touchstone responds to Rosalind with a line
that the Folio and almost all editions print as prose: “And mine, but it grows something
stale with me” (58-59). Dusinberre notes that the clown’s “prose line ironically ‘caps’
Rosalind’s stagy couplet” (58n). Why must this line be prose? It reads as a rough blank
verse line: “And MINE, but IT grows SOMEthing STALE with ME.” Perhaps his verse
line caps Rosalind’s couplet—a better fit for the staleness Touchstone wishes to convey.
Finally, Celia’s three-line response, which the previous Arden editor printed as prose,
carries less of an iambic beat than Touchstone’s line and sets off a series of short lines
that conclude this excerpt. But are these short lines, or are they fragments of verse? We
might arrange them this way:
148
I faint almost to death.
Touchstone:
Rosalind:
Holla, you clown! [10 iambic beats]
Peace, fool, he’s not thy kinsman.
Corin:
Who calls? [9 beats]
Touchstone: Your betters, sir.
Corin:
Else are they very wretched.
[11 beats, unstressed ending]
The point here is not to correct editorial choices but to show that the play’s troubling of
the verse/prose distinction haunts its textual cruxes. And more important, this troubling is
richly accessible to readers, who negotiate with the written text as a theatergoer does not.
But the prose and verse blend of the play is not the only feature that shows its
reader-oriented design, or its multimedia qualities. The textual world of As You Like It
offers a huge array of prose styles and verse forms. While this quality registers on stage
to the extent that spectators witness various texts being read, recited, sung, and
exchanged, it works on the printed page, where the reader can peruse literary forms both
familiar and strange. This range includes discrete forms, but the play also features several
characters who themselves embody certain literary styles or trends.42 Jaques is the most
obvious of these. His own self-description announces him as a satirist of precisely the
sort that was arousing controversy in 1599 (2.7.70-87). Even his casual remarks are
satirical:
42 On the embodiment of literary styles, see Bruster’s chapter “The Structural Transformation of
Print,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Culture, 65-94.
149
Well then, if ever I thank any man I’ll thank you; but that they call compliment is
like th’encounter of two dog-apes. And when a man thanks me heartily, methinks
I have given him a penny and he renders me the beggarly thanks. Come, sing; —
and you that will not, hold your tongues. (2.5.20-25)
Perhaps our familiarity with Jaques’ melancholy has led us to neglect that his “railing”
style of speaking tells us exactly what to expect from him. He speaks in the highly
personal style reminiscent of Martin Marprelate, so it should hardly surprise us when he
claims his words are “medicine” to heal society’s ills (2.7.61).43 In the same way,
Orlando embodies a literary style and genre. He is the earnest Petrarchan lover, who
fittingly butts heads with Jaques and who speaks just as such a courtier/lover would:
If ever you have looked on better days,
If ever been where bells have knolled to church,
If ever sat at any good man’s feast,
If ever from your eyelids wiped a tear,
And know what ’tis to pity and be pitied—
Let gentleness my strong enforcement be …. (2.7.114-19)
He reminds us irresistibly of Sidney’s Arcadia, in which exiled men of high station enter
the forest and find themselves making stylistic negotiations. Finally, Celia’s wit
embodies the spirit of John Lyly’s Euphues, the most popular literary creation and prose
style of the 1580s:
43 See Alvin B. Kernan, The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance (1959; Hamden,
CT: Archon Books, 1976), esp. 132-34; and Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poets’ War, 108-12.
150
Herein I see thou lov’st me not with the full weight that I love thee. If my uncle,
thy banished father, had banished thy uncle, the Duke my father, so thou hadst
been still with me I could have taught my love to take thy father for mine. So
wouldst thou, if the truth of thy love to me were so righteously tempered as mine
is to thee. (1.2.8-14)
This speech bears the hallmarks of euphuism: periphrasis (the second and third sentences
unpack and extend the first), perfect syntactic and logical balance (“if … so … So … if
…”), and repetition.44
In addition to embodiments of literary styles, the play features a virtual
encyclopedia of verse forms.45 It comes as no surprise to see blank verse in the play, but
even this normative medium betrays variations, as in the difference between the court’s
highly wrought poetry and the forest court’s much looser mode of discourse. There are
also couplets, which Adam and Orlando exchange as they prepare to flee to the forest:
Orlando:
… And ere we have thy youthful wages spent
We’ll light upon some settled low content.
Adam:
Master, go on and I will follow thee
To the last gasp with truth and loyalty. (2.3.67-70)
44 Cf. Vickers, The Art of Shakespeare’s Prose, 213: Celia’s main role is of “preserving wit from
its enemy Romance.” See also Clara Calvo, “In Defence of Celia: Discourse Analysis and Women’s
Discourse in As You Like It,” Essays and Studies 47 (1994): 91-115.
45 See William N. West, Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2002).
151
Adam “follows” Orlando not just physically but stylistically, picking up on his couplet
perhaps to signify his “truth and loyalty.” We also witness at least one jig—that of
Touchstone after the failed marriage ceremony (3.3.88-97).46 Amiens’ songs, each of
different measure, stand out on the page for their irregular line lengths. And Orlando’s
love poems, also of various measures and stanzaic structures, show the Petrarchan lover
at work on his (admittedly bad) poetry.
The play’s prose demonstrates a similar range. Celia, as we have seen, embodies
euphuism, and Jaques’s prose often hearkens back to the Marprelate pamphlets.
Touchstone appropriates the aphoristic style of Bacon’s Essays when he describes the
shepherd’s life:
Truly, shepherd, in respect of itself, it is a good life; but in respect that it is a
shepherd’s life, it is naught. In respect that it is solitary, I like it very well; but in
respect that it is private, it is a very vile life. Now in respect it is in the fields, it
pleaseth me well; but in respect it is not in the court, it is tedious. As it is a spare
life, look you, it fits my humour well; but as there is no more plenty in it, it goes
much against my stomach. (3.2.13-20)47
46 See Juliet Dusinberre, “Touchstone and Kemp in As You Like It,” Shakespeare Newsletter 52,
no. 4 [255] (Winter 2002): 93; and Juliet Dusinberre, “Topical Forest: Kemp and Mar-text in Arden,” in In
Arden: Editing Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of Richard Proudfoot, ed. Ann Thompson and Gordon
McMullan (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2003), 239-51. Dusinberre and other editors rearrange the Folio
text so that the scene reads like a jig instead of prose. Readers of the Folio would have to puzzle this for
themselves.
47 Corin’s response to this speech out-Bacons Touchstone (3.2.22-29). Cf. this famous Baconian
aphorism: “Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. And therefore if
a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit; and
if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not.” See Francis Bacon:
The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), 81.
152
His plain style anatomizes the situation and unpacks his feelings about the bucolic life.
(Whether he produces knowledge is another question—see Chapter Two.) Rosalind
occasionally uses the smooth, heightened romantic prose of Philip Sidney, especially
when she is talking to Orlando.48 These verse and prose forms, together on the page,
materialize Bednarz’s suggestion that Arden constitutes “a forest of the literary
imagination.”49
With no intended irony, the play deserves Polonius’s label “tragical-comicalhistorical-pastoral,” for it contains aspects or qualities of many genres.50 It is a comedy of
the sort Shakespeare had been writing for a decade. As in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
young lovers flee to the forest to escape an angry and malevolent authority figure. But it
is also a prose pastoral romance in the vein of Sidney’s Arcadia, not to mention
Shakespeare’s source for the play, Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde.51 It is also a satire: many
scholars have seen the play as Shakespeare’s intervention in the War of the Theaters,
with Jonson as its satirical target.52 Orlando’s poems—if we gathered them together, as
Rosalind and Celia seem to be doing in 3.2—make up a conventional Petrarchan lyric
sequence. We even witness a masque that features the goddess Hymen and resolves the
48 See, for example, 3.2.331-38; 3.2.390-406; 4.1.86-99; 4.1.176-84.
49 Shakespeare and the Poets’ War, 121.
50 Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1982), 2.2.394-95. See also Bednarz,
Shakespeare and the Poets’ War, 121: the play is a “compendium of generic motifs.”
51 Cf. Gibbons, Shakespeare and Multiplicity, 154: Shakespeare “find[s] in the theory and style of
pastoral itself a fertile comic subject, and transform[s] its themes into dramatic poetry of a kind that
honours the shade of Sidney.”
52 See ibid.; Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from His Life (London:
Arden Shakespeare, 2001), 125; and Grace Tiffany, “‘That Reason Wonder May Diminish’: As You Like It,
Androgyny, and the Theater Wars,” Huntington Library Quarterly 57, no. 3 (1994): 213-239. Tiffany
argues that Shakespeare “fashioned As You Like It in part to reject the satiric method demonstrated and
championed” by Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour (215).
153
plot in a conventionally speedy dénouement. Touchstone and Audrey offer us a dialogue
about poetry that paraphrases Sidney’s Defense of Poesy (3.3.10-25), and Rosalind, Celia,
Touchstone, and Jaques take turns criticizing Orlando’s poetry just as George Puttenham
does with poems he cites in The Art of English Poesy. The play is also part courtier’s
manual, as when Touchstone anatomizes the art of lying (5.4.68-81, 89-101) and
Rosalind the art of loving (3.2.287-417). This generic catalog, along with the collection
of writing styles, turn As You Like It, on the printed page, into an anthology of literary
elements. Shakespeare’s play about the forest of Arden, like Ben Jonson’s aptly titled
collection of poems “The Forest” (1616), fits perfectly into the tradition of poetic
miscellanies called “florilegia” or “books of flowers.”53
The Medium Is the Message
Although the play did not appear in print until 1623, it must have offered an even
richer experience to readers than to playgoers from the very start. In the highly fraught,
politically charged 1599 literary marketplace, Shakespeare’s hodge-podge of prose and
verse seems perfectly appropriate. Writing with both theater and print markets in mind,
Shakespeare included features that are only fully apparent on the printed page.54 Yet this
quality of As You Like It, intriguing in its own right, serves a literary purpose. It shows us
53 Jonson’s collection even contains his poem “To Celia.” The connection merits further
exploration.
54 Admittedly, it is also possible that, as Erne and others have suggested, Shakespeare revised the
play into its current form after its theatrical run. Either option leaves Shakespeare seriously contemplating
the world of print.
154
that instead of a play “in which Plot has been almost forgotten in the cause of Wit,” or
one whose many literary features become a “substitute for plot,” As You Like It represents
in itself a dynamic literary marketplace. Nothing seems to happen in the play because the
primary actions are transactions of a literary sort. And instead of being a substitute for a
plot, these transactions actually are the plot; the medium is the message of the play. If the
medium only replaced the message, then the play would be about itself as a play—it
would only always be metatheatrical. But if the media are the message, then the play is
about the dynamics at work in those media. In and through this fictional economy,
Shakespeare ultimately exposes the workings of the actual literary marketplace of 1599
London.
What does it mean that the world of As You Like It is itself a literary marketplace?
For one thing, the texts in that world, whether written, spoken, or even sung, exist in a
system of exchange. Admittedly, as the Introduction argued, the same could be said of
any play. The witty dialogue of Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado may be construed as
a literary competition of the Nashe/Harvey sort; Brutus’s and Antony’s speeches to the
Roman public—one in prose, one in verse—suggest the kind of literary one-upsmanship
we might expect from the War of the Theaters. But As You Like It is different, because
such exchanges are the main concern of the play. Furthermore, they make up a whole
exchange-based system in which words are both currency and commodity.55 Over and
against Maurice Hunt’s claim about the play that it “demonstrates the inadequacies … of
speech itself” and the power of deeds to convey what words cannot, words are the only
55 See Bruster, “Representational Market.”
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deeds that matter in the Arden marketplace.56 Thus to say the play is itself a literary
marketplace is to say that the how of a speech, dialogue, poem, song, or scene is the what
of the play, and that to understand what is happening at any moment we must look at the
way literary forms are valued and circulated. Characters buy and sell with prose and
verse; they invest in certain kinds of speech or writing; they get bailed out with it; sadly,
some go bankrupt without it. Most important, while Richard II achieved a sense of self by
learning to talk about himself and Portia achieved knowledge by exploiting the word “if,”
Rosalind finally achieves authority by cornering the literary market.
Readers often find puzzling Duke Frederick’s sudden dismissal of Rosalind and
Celia from the court in Act One, but in the context of the literary market it is a
predictable, even shrewd, business decision. The usurper has evidently allowed Rosalind
to stay behind for his daughter Celia’s sake (1.3.64), and he exiles her on the vague
rationale that he simply does not trust her (51). He seems to have no reliable evidence for
this mistrust, and so the hastiness of this shift seems like sheer paranoia. Defending
herself, Rosalind claims even her thoughts have remained loyal:
If with myself I hold intelligence,
Or have acquaintance with mine own desires,
If that I do not dream, or be not frantic—
As I do trust I am not—then, dear uncle,
Never so much as in a thought unborn
56 Maurice A. Hunt, Shakespeare’s As You Like It: Late Elizabethan Culture and Literary
Representation (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 51.
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Did I offend your highness. (1.3.44-49)
Obliquely invoking the principle of decorum, which seeks a correspondence between
thoughts and words, Rosalind claims that her outward show matches her inner
sentiments. Frederick rejects this logic, claiming that “If their [traitors’] purgation do
consist in words, / They are as innocent as grace itself” (50-51). Unlike his niece, he
assumes a disjunction between thoughts and words, and he accuses her on this basis,
which seems unfounded.
But he is not wholly tyrannical for doing so, because the two cousins have given
stylistic reasons for his suspicion. In their first scene together (1.2), Rosalind and Celia
engage in prose repartee with each other, with Touchstone, and finally with Le Beau.
Their playful prose seems harmless enough; it is funny, to be sure. But Shakespeare also
takes pains to show the two women taking verbal jabs at Le Beau, who stands for the
literary values of Frederick’s court.57 When Le Beau begins to narrate a conventional
prose romance—“There comes an old man and his three sons”—the women interrupt him
much as they do each other and Touchstone (1.2.113). Their comic prose style conflicts
with his more courtly style, and this verbal grappling proves just as important as the
wrestling that occurs a few moments later. The conflict persists into the next scene, which
opens with still more playful prose (1.3.1-34). We have already seen how the Duke’s
entry into this scene effects a switch to verse, a medium suited to the court atmosphere
(1.3.38), and we have seen how Rosalind switches media accordingly (39). But the verse
57 S. S. Hussey points out that in the court scenes characters “adopt the typical prose of some
earlier Elizabethan writing, full of balance and antithesis.” See The Literary Language of Shakespeare, 2nd
ed. (London: Longman, 1992), 207.
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she speaks in self-defense rings false compared to the prose she has spoken up to this
point. Even if her words correspond to her thoughts, they do not fit the courtly
environment, as her treatment of Le Beau demonstrates. Rosalind is not exiled without
reason; she is exiled because her medium has no purchasing power at Frederick’s court.
Indeed, Frederick is right to see her as a linguistic competitor (“She is too subtle for thee
[Celia], and her smoothness, / Her very silence and her patience / Speak to the people”
[74-76]). The only person who seems to value the two women’s snappy prose dialogue is
Touchstone, and he follows them into the forest, a loyal shareholder.
One of the first things we hear on entering Arden is that the forest is filled with
literary materials and has distinctive styles. In blank verse more flowing than his
brother’s, Duke Senior proclaims that the forest life, “exempt from public haunt, / Finds
tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in
everything” (2.1.15-17). The forest does not simply provide a context for literary
exchanges; it becomes those exchanges, turning the very landscape into a literary
marketplace. Amiens, the forest equivalent to Le Beau, responds pleasantly to the Duke’s
speech:
I would not change it. Happy is your grace
That can translate the stubbornness of fortune
Into so quiet and so sweet a style. (18-20)
The harsh, if elevated, style of Frederick’s court gives way to a “quiet” and “sweet” one.
The Duke does not seem to do any writing of his own, but according to Amiens he is an
excellent translator. (One thinks, by analogy, of the many translators on the 1590s
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London literary scene, such as John Florio.) Hunt argues that “Shakespeare takes pains to
emphasize that the language of pastoral may not be that special in its expressive power
after all,” but pastoral is never represented as an idealized or idealizing literary discourse
in the first place.58 If it provides a setting for other literary exchanges, it also gets
exchanged itself. Like Jaques’ satire, Touchstone’s wise foolery, Orlando’s bad
Petrarchan poetry, and Amiens’ songs, it belongs to the larger circulation of literary
artifacts and forms that Shakespeare offers us as we walk through the multimedia forest.
In this context, Orlando’s shout on entering the Duke’s merry gathering, “Forbear
and eat no more!” creates a formal as well as physical interruption, and as we read it, we
see different styles and media shaping each other (2.7.88). Orlando’s short line jars
against the blank verse being spoken before his entry, and he elicits Jaques’ similarly
short response, “Why, I have ate none yet” (89). Like Jonson and the other combatants in
the War of the Theaters, Jaques appropriates Orlando’s medium and turns it wittily
against him. In the ensuing dialogue, several other media shifts occur. Duke Senior offers
a “sweet” blank verse response to Orlando:
Art thou thus boldened, man, by thy distress?
Or else a rude despiser of good manners,
That in civility thou seem’st so empty? (92-94)
Still desperate, Orlando demands in harsher verse that his “affairs” be “answered” before
anyone eats the fruit on offer (100), to which Jaques responds, somewhat unexpectedly,
58 Hunt, Shakespeare’s As You Like It, 62. See also Paul Alpers, What Is Pastoral? (Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 1996), 71-78.
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in prose: “An you will not be answered with reason, I must die” (101-2). He attempts to
lighten the situation by shifting from verse to the conventionally comic prose. The
Duke’s follow-up to this line appears to fall somewhere in between prose and verse, and
as a result presents editors with a crux. The Folio text reads:
What would you haue?
Your gentlenesse shall force, more then your force
Moue vs to gentlenesse.59
Most editors follow Pope in rearranging the lines as two lines of blank verse:
What would you have? Your gentleness shall force
More than your force move us to gentleness. (2.7.103-4)
More than which lineation is “correct,” what matters here is the way Orlando’s short line
intrusion has affected the very text of the scene. Even though the Duke’s lines read like
iambic pentameter lines, they can also be short lines like Orlando’s. But Orlando too is
affected, because he notices how the Duke speaks “so gently,” and he shifts his own
verse accordingly. He even borrows the Duke’s terminology, asking the foresters to “let
gentleness my strong enforcement be” (119). Realizing that harsh speech has no
exchange value, Orlando finds a style that can buy food for Adam.
This is not the only time Orlando must invest in a different way of speaking and
writing. The play’s central scene, 3.2, comprises a series of prose dialogues that seem
unnecessary with respect to the play’s action. The scene begins with Orlando’s
Petrarchan love poem and then breaks into exchanges between Touchstone and Corin,
59 Knowles, ed., As You Like It, 127.
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Touchstone and Rosalind, Rosalind and Celia, Orlando and Jaques, and finally Orlando
and Rosalind. Vickers long ago noted that these “confrontations result not in
developments of the plot nor in insights into character but in still more set-speeches.”
Thus, he claimed, the play is “static rather than dynamic.”60 As a set of exchanges in a
represented literary marketplace, however, the scene is the very definition of dynamic.
Indeed, it marks the beginning of a shift in the play’s literary marketplace from a versebased, Petrarchan economy to a prose-based dialogic economy not unlike that of the
novel.61 Orlando’s poem, one of a sequence he has posted all over the forest, shows his
investment in a certain literary style:
Hang there, my verse, in witness of my love.
And thou, thrice-crowned queen of the night, survey
With thy chaste eye, from thy pale sphere above,
Thy huntress’ name that my full life doth sway.
O Rosalind, these trees shall be my books,
And in their barks my thoughts I’ll character,
That every eye which in this forest looks
Shall see thy virtue witnessed everywhere.
Run, Run, Orlando, carve on every tree
The fair, the chaste and unexpressive she! (3.2.1-10)
60 Vickers, The Artistry of Shakespeare’s Prose, 200.
61 Cf. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: U of Texas P, 1988), 278:
“The prose artist [the novelist] elevates the social heteroglossia surrounding objects into an image that has
finished contours, an image completely shot through with dialogized overtones; he creates artistically
calculated nuances on all the fundamental voices and tones of this heteroglossia.” This describes what
confronts us in As You Like It, 3.2.
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Though not quite the fourteen-line lyric we might expect, the poem nevertheless contains
the full range of Petrarchan-Elizabethan conventions: references to Queen Elizabeth-asclassical-deity (2-4), materialization of poetry (5), expression of internal state (6), a
reading audience (7), praise of the beloved (8), self-exhortation (9), and the
inexpressibility topos (10).62 In making the trees his books and promising to write on
them, Orlando invests in Petrarchan love discourse. Perhaps he carries this courtliness
over from Duke Senior’s forest court. Once the young lover exits, though, Corin and
Touchstone enter and engage in a dialogue that questions the class values of courtly love
poetry and emphasizes their uselessness. Informed by Touchstone that never being at
court puts one in a “parlous state” (42), the shepherd Corin affirms the contingency of
courtly manners and values:
Not a whit, Touchstone. Those that are good manners at the court are as ridiculous
in the country as the behaviour of the country is most mockable at the court. (4346)
When Touchstone tries to pick apart this claim, Corin retreats into the very contingency
of value he just proposed: “You have too courtly a wit for me, I’ll rest” (67). By this
measure, courtly manners, including and especially the love discourse in which Orlando’s
poems are invested, hardly counts as an asset.
This devaluing of Orlando’s love language continues when Rosalind and then
Celia enter and read his poems aloud. Just as his harsh short lines had little purchasing
62 Dusinberre notes that the poem is a dizain, “a ten-line poem popular in France, particularly
associated with the poet Maurice Scève, who was admired by Sidney” (1-10n).
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power in Duke Senior’s court, his (admittedly bad) lyrics trade for very little here.
Indeed, the ensuing meta-poetical dialogues between Rosalind and Touchstone and
Rosalind and Celia suggest not only that his verses have no value but that he himself is
bankrupt. In the poem Rosalind reads, every line rhymes, and Touchstone parodies it,
concluding that “this is the very false gallop of verses” (110). Not knowing who wrote it,
the two trade jokes about how bad the poem is:
Rosalind: Peace, you dull fool, I found them [the verses] on a tree.
Touchstone: Truly, the tree yields bad fruit.
Rosalind: I’ll graft it with you, and then I shall graft it with a medlar. Then it will
be the earliest fruit i’th’country, for you’ll be rotten ere you be half ripe,
and that’s the right virtue of the medlar.
Touchstone: You have said.—But whether wisely or no, let the forest judge. (11219)
The two compete over whose joke is funniest, submitting it to the audience (the “forest”)
to judge. This quality highlights the marketplace dynamics of the scene, for they are
asking the audience to choose between their products. But their jokes also recall the
popular early modern notion that a person’s style informs us about that person’s mind.63
Alluding to Christ’s claim that a bad tree cannot yield good fruit and vice versa,
63 See Bruster, Shakespeare and the Question of Culture, 85-89. See also George Puttenham’s
chapter “On Style,” in The Art of English Poesy, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 2007), 233-38.
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Touchstone implies that the writer, like his verses, is bad. Rosalind turns the joke against
Touchstone, suggesting the poem is fit to be bred with a medlar (slang for prostitute).64
When Celia enters reading yet another bad poem, the two women criticize the
verses further and suggest that their writer is lame (161-73).65 Once Rosalind learns the
writer’s identity, though, the conversation shifts in both tone and content. Rosalind
excitedly asks about Orlando, and her friend does her best to describe how she found
him:
Celia: There lay he stretched along like a wounded knight—
Rosalind: Though it be a pity to see such a sight, it well becomes the ground.
Celia: Cry holla to thy tongue, I prithee: it curvets unseasonably. He was
furnished like a hunter—
Rosalind: O ominous, he comes to kill my heart!
Celia: I would sing my song without a burden – thou bring’st me out of tune.
Rosalind: Do you not know I am a woman? When I think, I must speak. Sweet,
say on. (233-43)
This moment marks a change in Rosalind’s and Celia’s erstwhile intimate relationship.66
Rosalind’s alliances are shifting from female friendship to marriage, and we might read
Celia’s annoyance as a response to her friend’s affection for Orlando. But something
64 See Brissenden’s paraphrase of Rosalind’s speech, 113-16n.
65 Clare Kinney notes that “the conversation may be thought of as a prose equivalent to the
Theocritan/Virgilian singing match often imitated by Elizabethan pastoralists.” See Clare R. Kinney,
“Feigning Female Faining: Spenser, Lodge, Shakespeare, and Rosalind,” Modern Philology 95, no. 3
(February 1998): 309.
66 See Jan Stirm, “‘For Solace a Twinne-Like Sister’: Teaching Themes of Sisterhood in As You
Like It and Beyond,” Shakespeare Quarterly 47, no. 4 (1996): 374-86.
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decidedly literary is happening as well. Celia keeps trying to narrate within the same
univocal, Petrarchan framework that Orlando uses, but Rosalind keeps preventing her.
She does not deny that he might look like a wounded knight, but she places that image in
the context of female rather than male desire. Her cry that he dresses like a hunter to “kill
[her] heart” comes with deep irony, considering that she is herself disguised as a
shepherd boy. And her claim that her thoughts and words correspond recapitulates
Orlando’s promise to “character” his thoughts in the trees. Celia’s speeches offer a set of
representational assets, and each of Rosalind’s responses refuses to buy them at face
value.
As the scene comes to a close, Orlando reveals that he is capable of diversifying
his stylistic portfolio, and Rosalind convinces him to do just that. He and Jaques enter,
and for a moment it seems Jaques will outsatirize him within Rosalind’s view. Asked
how tall his beloved is, Orlando responds that she is “just as high as my heart” (262). But
when Jaques pokes fun at him, the young man proves apt:
Jaques: You are fully of pretty answers. Have you not been acquainted with
goldsmiths’ wives, and conned them out of rings?
Orlando: Not so; but I answer you right painted cloth, from whence you have
studied your questions. (263-67)
This response impresses Jaques, because he asks if Orlando wants to sit with him and rail
against the world. The two then bandy satirical words against each other until Jaques
gives up and exits. Apparently Orlando impresses Rosalind too, because she steps
forward to “speak to him like a saucy lackey” (287). In the long dialogue that follows
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(288-417), she talks him into playing the love-game whereby they will both pretend she
is Rosalind. Like a master saleswoman, she strikes up a conversation (“what is’t
o’clock?” [291]), then turns the conversation slowly to the products she wants to sell
(“An old religious uncle taught me to speak … one that knew courtship well, for there he
fell in love” [331-34]). She arouses Orlando’s curiosity (“Can you remember any of the
principal evils that he laid to the charge of women?” [339-40]) and gets him to admit that
his current literary discourse is not fully satisfying (“I would I could make thee believe I
love” [370-71]). This point is crucial. She gets Orlando to admit that the Petrarchan love
language in which he has invested so much does not meet his expressive needs. Thus
when he exclaims that “Neither rhyme nor reason can express how much” he loves
Rosalind, he thinks he is resorting to the inexpressibility topos, but he is also
acknowledging what the whole scene has been showing us: the
courtly/Petrarchan/romantic discourse has little or no exchange value in the Arden
marketplace (382-83). Rosalind presses this advantage, offering him a new investment
opportunity—a new fictional situation.
We must not undervalue the importance of the prose medium in which this whole
scene takes place. The highly wrought verse that begins the scene gives way to a
masterpiece of prose dialogue.67 In one exchange after another, Shakespeare’s characters
show just how worthless Orlando’s love language is—a fact made more pronounced by
his oversaturation of that market. After all, he promises to write on “every tree” (9,
67 Knowles quotes J. C. Smith: “This great scene, the longest and most important in the play,
seems to consist of a number of detached dialogues, connected merely by happening in one place….
Everything here leads up to the meeting of Orlando and Rosalind” (146n1199).
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emphasis added). Throughout the scene, his words, style, conventions, and fictional
constructions become devalued currency, their exchange value decreasing with every
stage of the dialogue. Rosalind, who disguises herself specifically in order to achieve
linguistic capital, gets Orlando to invest in her literary stock, which is at once theatrical
and novelistic.
The subsequent scenes leading up to the play’s conclusion demonstrate Rosalind’s
dominance of the literary market and Orlando’s newly rising stock within it. The scene in
which Phoebe falls in love with Rosalind, 3.5, is a verse scene with a single prose speech.
By contrast, 4.1, which follows it and in which Rosalind falls in love (again) with
Orlando, is a prose scene with a single verse speech. Witnessing Phoebe scorn Silvius in
verse in the first scene, Rosalind advances to defend him. Captivated by Rosalind’s
eloquent anger, Phoebe says she “had rather hear you chide than this man [Silvius] woo”
(66). Rosalind breaks somewhat unexpectedly into prose:
He’s fallen in love with your foulness, [to Silvius] and she’ll fall in love with my
anger. If it be so, as fast as she answers thee with frowning looks, I’ll sauce her
with bitter words. (67-70).
Conventionally, prose is the appropriate medium for this kind of speech. Rosalind breaks
into a meta-discursive mode and comments on what is happening. She also manages to
raise her stock with Phoebe, who already indicated a preference for her chiding. Thus,
when Rosalind exits, Phoebe talks excitedly about how the boy “talks well” and how his
words “do well” (111-12). The shepherdess promises to be “bitter” with Ganymede—the
very same word Rosalind used (140). Perhaps it is not just the verse diatribe but also the
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prose statement that Phoebe finds so appealing. Silvius speaks verse, but Rosalind is
bilingual. Of course, as Phoebe later recognizes, she is investing in fool’s gold. In the
end, Rosalind will transfer all of her credit to Silvius.
The next scene opens with Rosalind and Jaques having their only one-on-one
exchange in the whole play, and it ends with Rosalind making an apparently sincere and
enthusiastic statement of her love for Orlando. This rapid shift confuses many readers,
because at this point in the play we have come to see Rosalind as immune to flights of
romantic fancy. In this forest marketplace, however, where characters trade words as
commodities and currency, motives are literary motives. Just as Rosalind’s prose line led
Phoebe to buy into Ganymede’s bitter words, Orlando’s one blank verse line in this scene
raises his stock and makes him not Rosalind’s competitor but her business partner. Jaques
explains his unique form of melancholy as the product of his many travels (10-18).
Rosalind responds with the kind of one-up critique we have come to expect from these
two satirists:
A traveller! By my faith, you have great reason to be sad. I fear you have sold
your own lands to see other men’s. Then to have seen much and to have nothing
is to have rich eyes and poor hands. (19-22)
This speech is as much about his stylistic habits as his experiences. She accuses him of
compiling a pastiche of others’ styles rather than having one all his own. At just this
point, Orlando enters and offers his plain, blank verse line, “Good day and happiness,
dear Rosalind” (27), only to have Jaques famously respond, “Nay then, God b’wi’ you
and you talk in blank verse” (28-9). Orlando interrupts the flow of prose just as Rosalind
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did in the previous scene, while Jaques, made self-conscious about style after Rosalind’s
riposte, criticizes Orlando for the same insincere language use for which Rosalind
criticized him.
Yet Orlando’s verse line raises his stock with Rosalind precisely because it
annoys Jaques, who had been one of her chief literary competitors. The comparatively
plain “Good day and happiness, dear Rosalind” drives away, rather than invites, stylistic
competition with her, for throughout the rest of the scene, Orlando refuses to play witgames with Rosalind. Instead he maintains a noticeably plain style, straightforward
almost to a fault. When she chastises his lateness in a speech filled with humor and
wordplay (40-44), he responds simply, “Pardon me, dear Rosalind” (45). While she
persists in playfulness, he offers only muted, believably sincere rejoinders:
Rosalind: Come, woo me, woo me—for now I am in a holiday humour and like
enough to consent. What would you say to me now an I were your very,
very Rosalind?
Orlando: I would kiss before I spoke.
Rosalind: Nay, you were better speak first, and when you were gravelled for lack
of matter you might take occasion to kiss. Very good orators when they
are out, they will spit, and for lovers lacking (God warrant us) matter, the
cleanliest shift is to kiss.
Orlando: How if the kiss be denied? (62-72)
Even if Orlando’s unwillingness to play along fails to entertain, it nevertheless stands out,
especially next to the stylistically competitive dialogue with Jaques that preceded it. In
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this respect, Orlando’s response to Rosalind’s famous speeches about dead lovers (86-99)
and about the transition from courtship to marriage (136-46) are just as important as the
speeches themselves. Told that men have died but never for love, he replies only, “I
would not have my right Rosalind of this mind, for I protest her frown might kill me”
(100-1). When Rosalind promises that her behavior will change after they marry, Orlando
responds, with annoying practicality, “But will my Rosalind do so?” (147). What matters
here is not simply that he refuses to play along with the love-game, but that he refuses to
bandy with Rosalind, as Celia and Touchstone have done throughout the play. We cannot
admire the fullness of his wit, but we are not really supposed to.
A play in which nothing seems to happen must still come to an end. And what
precipitates that end derives from the play’s media. After Orlando has come and told
Rosalind, in the unadorned style in which he is now invested, “I can no longer live by
thinking,” Silvius and Phoebe return to the stage (5.2.49). The four characters engage in
what is unmistakably a pastoral eclogue, of the sort that occurs throughout Sidney’s
Arcadia and other pastoral romances:68
Phoebe: Good shepherd, tell this youth what ’tis to love.
Silvius: It is to be all made of sighs and tears,
And so am I for Phoebe.
Phoebe: And I for Ganymede.
Orlando: And I for Rosalind.
Rosalind: And I for no woman. (79-84)
68 See Alpers, What is Pastoral?, 223-29.
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They go around like this several times until Rosalind asks to whom Orlando is referring
and Orlando answers, in another blank verse line, “To her that is not here nor doth not
hear” (104). The pastoral spell breaks, and Rosalind returns to the prose with which she
has cornered the Arden market:
Pray you no more of this, ’tis like the howling of Irish wolves against the moon.
[to Silvius] I will help you if I can. [to Phoebe] I would love you if I could.—
Tomorrow meet me all together. (105-8)
Together, Orlando’s blank verse and Rosalind’s prose shut down the eclogue and propel
us to the play’s final set of literary exchanges.
In the final scene, often maligned for its clumsiness, Shakespeare shows Rosalind
every inch a business tycoon, though she speaks only twenty-one lines, all in verse.
Hymen, speaking in choppy rhyming verse, “bar[s] confusion” by arranging the
couples—an unnecessary action, considering that everyone knows who must end up with
whom (123). All Rosalind really needs to do is reveal herself, and the marriage
contingencies will function as she has designed. Yet she arranges this spectacle, which
falls generically somewhere between masque and pageant. Why? Her prose epilogue
provides a hint:
If it be true that good wine needs no bush, ’tis true that a good play needs no
epilogue. Yet to good wine they do use good bushes, and good plays prove the
better by the help of good epilogues. (Epilogue, 3-6)
Writers add unnecessary epilogues in order to advertize their plays’ good qualities, and to
raise their plays’ value in the literary economy. Similarly, in the final scene, having
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established herself in the forest’s marketplace of words, Rosalind presses her advantage
with advertizing. Indeed, like a good chief executive, she arranges the scene so that she
has little work to do herself and so that the credit finds its way eventually to her. The
marriages fall into place. Jaques seems bankrupt, incapable of any longer exchanging
with the figures around him, and never addresses Rosalind in the final scene. She even
brings Duke Frederick into her monopoly, for the old religious man who reportedly
convinces the usurper to convert sounds suspiciously like the “old religious uncle” she
mentions earlier (3.2.332) and the “magician” she has learned from since age three
(5.2.59). The scene is so clumsy because there is no one left with whom Rosalind must
compete for literary capital. Here is where the literary marketplaces of Arden and London
finally converge. As Shakespeare ends his play with an epilogue advertisement and
Rosalind ends hers with a masque advertisement, the literary world of Arden illuminates
the literariness of London’s theaters as well as its books.
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Chapter Four: Hamlet’s Parentheses
Near the end of Hamlet, just before Osric enters to ask Hamlet to fence, the prince
makes the often overlooked statement, “The interim’s mine.”1 He is responding to
Horatio’s concern that little time remains before Claudius finds out that Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern are dead. The “interim” to which he refers is, of course, the delay before
news comes from England, as it eventually does. But the word “interim” itself and the
fact that Hamlet claims it for his own have more significance. A Latin adverb
transplanted directly to English fifty years before Shakespeare’s time, the noun “interim”
literally means “the between” or “the meanwhile.”2 The prince’s “the interim’s mine”
suggests his taking possession of and placing himself within the space and time between
one event and another, between one person (the messenger from England) and another
(Claudius). The fact that the line appears in the 1623 folio but not the 1604 second quarto
contributes to this betweenness, for it indicates that Hamlet’s “interim” was cast between
one version and another. Perhaps the new language was seen as important but not
essential to the action of the play.
Another Renaissance figure behaves exactly as Hamlet does when he takes
possession of “the interim.” That figure places itself in the space and time between one
thing and another. That figure, like Hamlet, controls delay because it causes delay. That
1 All quotations come from Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Arden, 2006),
which is based on Q2 Hamlet. Citations from Q1 and F will be indicated as such and come from Hamlet:
The Texts of 1603 and 1623, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Arden, 2006). This line comes
from F, 5.2.73.
2 OED, s.v. “interim,” B1.
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figure, also like Hamlet, tends to digress. And that figure, by its very nature, is often
overlooked, as if it is helpful but not essential. That figure is the rhetorical figure
parenthesis, and its striking resemblance to the structure and action of Hamlet offers new
insight into the play’s persistent concerns. Delay, action, interiority, representation: long
before they became the keywords of Hamlet criticism, these terms belonged to
parenthesis, and to its structural effects in early modern English writing. Thus to
recognize the parentheses in Hamlet and Hamlet in, or as, the parenthesis is to see the
origins of what we find most valuable in the play. In other words, Hamlet’s parentheses
produce what four centuries of response to the play have either celebrated or derogated.
The question of what makes a play worth celebrating would have been especially
pressing for Shakespeare in 1600, when he was probably writing or revising Hamlet. The
new Globe was open, the War of the Theaters was underway, and the child actors were
making the competition for playgoers fierce. Scholars have long puzzled over why
Shakespeare decided to revive and revise the old Hamlet play (now known as the UrHamlet), but he must have seen something potentially worthwhile in it.3 Looking around
him at the turn of the century, with the 1590s “golden age” waning and the neoclassicism of writers like Jonson waxing, Shakespeare saw rapidly changing answers not
merely to the question “What will make a play sell?” but also to the question “What will
3 Perhaps it contributed to the generic variety of his other recent plays, As You Like It, Julius
Caesar, and Henry V, or perhaps John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, written for the Paul’s Boys around the
same time, elicited a competing revenge tragedy from the public playhouse. On Antonio’s Revenge, see
Alfred Harbage and S. Schoenbaum, eds., Annals of English Drama, 975-1700: An Analytical Record of All
Plays, Extant or Lost, rev. ed. (London: Methuen, 1964), 76-77; Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage,
1574-1642, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), 233; and James P. Bednarz, Shakespeare & the
Poets’ War (New York: Columbia UP, 2001), 133-51.
174
make a play good?” To the extent that both questions lead to the same dramatic ends of
eloquence and delight, they are effectively the same. But just as the first question leads to
others, such as “To what audience?” and “How long will it be marketable?” the second
creates connected but still more subtle problems: to which definition of beauty does a
play adhere, and to whose judgment is a playtext subject? Shakespeare addresses these
questions in Hamlet, whose title character makes more value judgments than any other
Shakespearean character, but he more powerfully addresses them through the play—that
is, through the play’s uniquely parenthetical features. Having exposed the changing
relationship between print and theatrical media in As You Like It, in and through Hamlet’s
parentheses Shakespeare examines the very systems of evaluation and exchange in the
literary world around him.
Parentheses are everywhere in Shakespeare’s play. They mark its speeches,
scenes, characters, and events. Indeed, its entire dramatic action is one big parenthesis.
This chapter will show that in Hamlet, Shakespeare’s literary engagement is not only
with repertorial trends, specific texts, rival writers, or political events, but with the
cultural values embedded in the parenthesis. As George Puttenham, Henry Peacham, and
other early modern rhetoricians describe it, the parenthesis is at once beautiful and
unnecessary. This very contradiction troubles much of early modern English literary
culture. Copiousness and decoration were valued precisely because they are not
necessary. At the turn of the century, however, in the literary circles to which
Shakespeare belonged, those values were being challenged by the neo-classicism of
Jonson and others, which emphasized that beauty and utility go hand-in-hand or are
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indeed the same.4 Shakespeare structures and styles Hamlet like a parenthesis, making
most of the play beautiful (i.e., aesthetically valuable) yet unnecessary (i.e., extractable,
and omittable, but also reusable). In doing so, he resolves the apparent conflict of
opposites, not by choosing one over the other but by writing a play in which opposites
become apposites. Faced with the choice between aesthetic unity and unity-breaking
deferral, Shakespeare picks both. He makes the appositional quality inherent in the
parenthesis into the basis of his play. In this regard, the play’s most important parentheses
for Shakespeare’s time and ours are the soliloquies. These speeches, at once the most
valuable and the most unnecessary parts of the play, have been construed as the markers
of Hamlet’s much-discussed delay, but they have also proven to be the most enduring and
influential speeches in the English language. This chapter will argue that the soliloquies’
fundamentally parenthetical qualities, along with the rest of Hamlet’s parentheses, make
Shakespeare’s most lasting intervention in the Renaissance literary market. He manages
to write a play beautiful in terms both old and new.
Hamlet criticism has long held that the play’s delay, which derives from Hamlet’s
delay, is either the chief hindrance to its aesthetic unity or the chief source of its value as
an aesthetic object, unified or otherwise.5 The play’s “logic of deferral” makes it either an
4 Hiram Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance (New York: Grove Press, 1960); Richard A. Lanham,
The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale UP, 1976); James
Jerome Murphy, ed., Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric
(Berkeley: U of California P, 1983); Michael Pincombe, Elizabethan Humanism: Literature and Learning
in the Later Sixteenth Century (Harlow, England: Longman, 2001); Neil Rhodes, The Power of Eloquence
and English Renaissance Literature (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), esp. 3-66. See also Wayne A.
Rebhorn, ed., Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2000).
5 See Hugh Grady, Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), 13392.
176
aesthetic success or an aesthetic failure, depending on one’s critical perspective. Delay is
thus the black hole of Hamlet criticism. Perhaps the most enduring and influential
comment on Hamlet’s delay comes from A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy. His
analysis of Hamlet’s character, in particular the causes and characteristics of the prince’s
delay, set the agenda for a hundred years of critical conversation. Opposing earlier critics
such as Johnson and Coleridge, Bradley argues that Hamlet’s melancholic disposition, his
“disgust at life and everything in it,” causes his delay.6 This claim, which ties Hamlet’s
character to the structure of the play, develops out of the hypothetical situation with
which Bradley opens his chapter on Hamlet:
Suppose you were to describe the plot of Hamlet to a person quite ignorant of the
play, and suppose you were careful to tell your hearer nothing about Hamlet’s
character, what impression would your sketch make on him? Would he not
exclaim: ‘What a sensational story! Why, here are some eight violent deaths, not
to speak of adultery, a ghost, a mad woman, and a fight in a grave!’...And would
he not then go on to ask: ‘But why in the world did not Hamlet obey the Ghost at
once, and so save seven of those eight lives?’ (93)
The “sketch” of the plot without “Hamlet’s character” makes an “impression” on the
hypothetical listener that Bradley later uses to claim that we comprehend the play only
when we comprehend the prince. He goes on to argue that “the tragedy of Hamlet with
Hamlet left out has become the symbol of extreme absurdity” (94).
6 A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth
(1904; New York: Penguin, 1991), 121.
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Bradley’s claim speaks for most Hamlet criticism over the last two-hundred years.
Surveying this period, Margreta de Grazia notes that “answers to the question of
Hamlet’s delay keep piling up,” to the extent that “no reading [is] valid unless it could
speak to the issue.”7 De Grazia argues forcefully that it was only at the end of the
eighteenth century that Hamlet became a figure of modern subjectivity, and only then that
delay became a problem:
Accounts of the play’s reception have assumed that an interiorized Hamlet had
been in the wings for two centuries, waiting to be discovered, postponing his
debut until around 1800 when the right audience came along.
Two centuries of critics, including Bradley, have overlooked the very premise of the play
in their almost exclusive focus on Hamlet’s interiority and on the delay presumably
caused by that interiority. Even though Bradley disagrees with Coleridge about the causes
of Hamlet’s delay, therefore, the two make the same assumption that Hamlet’s “penchant
for thought predates the play’s action” and thus whatever causes the prince’s delay also
causes the play’s (13). De Grazia shows how Hamlet accommodates every new definition
of interiority, noting that “there is now something of a tradition in which critics can reach
beyond their predecessors with newly available insights and theories into Hamlet’s
interiority” (22). If we do not take Hamlet’s supposedly “intransitive and unfathomable
depth” to be the play’s main concern, she argues, then that modern subjectivity is
7 Margreta De Grazia, Hamlet Without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 170.
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replaced by his “worldliness” as the reason for his central and complex role in the play.8
In contrast to Bradley’s “extreme absurdity,” Hamlet without Hamlet shows us that the
play’s deferral does not have to be identified with the prince’s modern self.
We can hardly deny the accuracy of de Grazia’s claims about Hamlet’s critical
history. She shows us that delay is not something to be explained via modern conceptions
of the self and that we should search for its causes in the play as a whole. Yet de Grazia
nevertheless attempts to explain Hamlet’s delay by noting his affinities with the stock
stage figures of the clown, madman, Vice, and devil. In other words, she still sees Hamlet
as the cause of Hamlet’s delay.
If we examine the play from the viewpoint of its investment in the parenthesis,
however, then we see that delay is the whole point. Rather than “Where does the delay
come from?” the question should be “What does the delay tell us?” What is more, that
parenthetical quality enables Hamlet’s extrication from the plot. The very process that de
Grazia describes working throughout the modern era, in which Hamlet-as-modern-subject
is treated as something independent of the play, is actually a structural effect of the playas-parenthesis. Modern critics have so easily extracted Hamlet’s personality because, as
is the case with the parenthesis, extractability is the play’s distinguishing feature. De
Grazia uncannily recapitulates this act when she attempts to give us a Hamlet without
Hamlet. In doing so, furthermore, she suggests that we must choose between the depth of
Hamlet’s interiority (a product of modern criticism) and the prince’s worldliness (an
8 Ibid., 5. Most of de Grazia’s book is dedicated to the task of unmodernizing the play, which she
distinguishes from recovering its originally intended or perceived meaning.
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unmodernized feature). Seen as a parenthesis, however, the play allows us to have both
person and plot, just as it makes two notorious opposites, unity and deferral, into
apposites.
The Renaissance Parenthesis, the Parenthetical Renaissance
The parenthesis could stand as the mascot for early modern eloquence or even
literature generally, understood as a beautification of discourse that is not strictly
necessary.9 As rhetoric manuals of the period describe it, parenthesis is an insertion of
words, phrases, or clauses into a sentence that is already grammatically complete. Unlike
most Renaissance rhetorical figures, such as paradiastole or antimetabole, its name
survives in common parlance to the present day, largely because of its characteristic
punctuation marks of the same name. By the mid-sixteenth century, the rounded brackets,
which Erasmus called lunulae (Latin for “little moons”), had become standard for a
number of conventional purposes, all of which accorded with the figure’s definition in the
manuals.10 Moreover, as both rhetorical figure and textual marker, it is among the most
visually noticeable figures in Renaissance texts. The parenthesis, which means “placing
beside,” was also known as interpositio, or “placing between.” In his A Treatise of
Tropes and Schemes (1550), Richard Sherry defines “Interpositio” as “a dissolucion of
the order of the words by putting a sentence betwixt, as: The man (I speke it for no
9 See note 4 above.
10 See John Lennard, But I Digress: Parentheses in English Printed Verse (Oxford: Clarendon P,
1991), 1-51.
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harme) wyl somtime haue his owne wyll.” In the margin of this text the word
“parenthesis” appears, indicating the interchangeability of the two terms.11 Abraham
Fraunce, in his Arcadian Rhetorike (1588), makes much the same point when he writes
that “sometime there is a parenthesis put between, but yet the thing is all one as if there
had been nothing inserted.”12 As we will see, this weird and paradoxical combination of
between and beside goes to the heart of Hamlet.
Two English rhetoric manuals provide extensive definitions of parenthesis, and
both bear with uncanny accuracy upon Shakespeare’s play. The first, George
Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589), categorizes parenthesis as a “figure of
tolerable disorder” and personifies it as “the Insertour.” The figure, Puttenham writes,
is when ye will seeme for larger information or some other purpose, to peece or
graf[t]e in the middest of your tale an unnecessary parcell of speach, which
neverthelesse may be thence without any detriment to the rest. The figure is so
common that it needeth none example, neverthelesse because we are to teache
Ladies and Gentlewomen to know their schoole points and termes appertaining to
the Art, we may not refuse to yeeld examples even in the plainest cases.13
The main purpose of parenthesis, according to Puttenham, is to provide additional
“information” unavailable in the non-parenthetical text. He makes explicit what
11 Richard Sherry, A Treatise of Tropes and Schemes. 1550 (Gainsville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles
& Reprints, 1961), 31.
12 Abraham Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetorike (London: 1588), n.p.
13 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, contriued into three bookes: the first of poets
and poesie, the second of proportion, the third of ornament (London: 1589; Kent, OH: Kent State UP,
1970), 180-81.
181
Fraunce’s “as if there had been nothing inserted” only implies: the parenthetical text is
completely “unnecessary” and may be removed (“may be thence”) without any loss or
“detriment” to the surrounding text. His description of parenthesis as a “parcell”
emphasizes that it works as a self-contained unit, easily extracted at the writer’s or
reader’s will.
But Puttenham seems conflicted, and that conflict points to the peculiarity of the
parenthesis. Unable to help himself, Puttenham goes on to provide two examples, one of
which comes from his own writing and includes a four-line parenthesis.14 By his own
account even these examples are unnecessary, because the figure is “so common” as not
to need examples. To comment upon his second example, he offers these ambivalent
words:
This insertion is very long and utterly impertinent to the principall matter, and
makes a great gappe in the tale, neverthelesse is no disgrace but rather a bewtie
and to very good purpose, but you must not use such insertions often nor to thick,
nor those that bee very long as this of ours, for it will breede great confusion to
have the tale so much interrupted. (181)
14 The text reads:
But now my Deere (for so my love makes me to call you still)
That love I say, that lucklesse love, that works me all this ill.
Also in our Eglogue intituled Elpine, which we made being but eightene yeares old, to king
Edward the sixt a Prince of great hope, we surmised that the Pilot of a ship answering the King, being
inquisitive and desirous to know all the parts of the ship and tackle, what they were, & to what use they
served, using this insertion or Parenthesis.
Soveraigne Lord (for why a greater name
To one on earth no mortall tongue can frame
No statelie stile can give the practisd penne:
To one on earth conversant among men.)
And so proceeds to answere the kings question?
The shippe thou seest sayling in sea so large, &c.
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Puttenham’s conjunctions tell the story. The interruption is impertinent, literally not
pertaining to the point of the main discourse; nevertheless, it is aesthetically valuable. But
too many and too long delays will create a “great gappe” and cause readers “confusion.”
He dithers over the status of the parenthesis. It is aesthetically valuable—a “bewtie”—but
it is also unnecessary and potentially detrimental to discourse. Puttenham cannot stake his
claim to one attribute without also conceding the other, because the two go hand-in-hand.
Henry Peacham’s rhetoric manual The Garden of Eloquence (1593) elaborates on
the problems Puttenham begins to address. Indeed, Peacham articulates the deeply
appositional quality of the parenthesis and why that quality exists. His description of the
figure appears on the very last page of his manual, perhaps a suggestion of its status as
paradoxically important—the last word—and unimportant, the last in line. His definition
begins with the familiar assertion that the parenthesis is, strictly speaking, unnecessary:
Parenthesis is a form of speech which setteth a sentence a sonder by the
interposition of another, or thus: When a sentence is cast betweene the speech
before it be all ended, which although it giveth some strength, yet being taken
away, it leaveth the same speech perfect enough.15
As in other definitions of parenthesis, Peacham uses the alternate term “interposition”
and states how if the parenthetical text is “taken away,” the remaining text is “perfect,” or
complete, by itself. Like Puttenham, he implies some “strength” or value in the figure
despite, and yet because of, its extraneous nature. After citing two examples, he gives
“The use of this figure,” a passage worth quoting at length:
15 Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (London: 1593), 198-99.
183
A Parenthesis is often put in, when the speaker supposing that the hearer may
demaund a reason, or make an objection to that which he saith, preventeth him by
an interposition expressed before the sentence be all ended, so that hereby it may
appeare that a Parenthesis serveth to confirme the saying by the interposicion of a
reason, and to confute the objection by the timely prevention of an answere: Also
where the sentence may seeme darke or doubtfull, it putteth in a short annotation
or exposition to give light and to resolve the doubt. (199)
For Puttenham the parenthesis can cause confusion, but here it helps to avoid or resolve
confusion. Peacham goes further than his contemporaries in showing how a speaker or
writer can use parentheses to prevent objections and to offer explanations that will
“resolve the doubt” about a sentence. In this sense, the parenthesis enables unhindered
communication that is also eloquent. Unlike writers who prefer the plain style, which
would remove unnecessary rhetorical decoration to maintain simplicity and clarity,
Peacham promises to enhance understanding by adding decoration.
Even so, the “use” of the parenthesis can also mar one’s speech or writing, a fact
that Peacham highlights when he gives “The Caution” about the figure. He taps into the
rhetorical and aesthetic potential of the “Insertour,” which is to speak both outside and
inside a piece of discourse:
Parentheses if they be verie long they cause obscuritie of the sense, and sometime
confusion of former and matter, in so much that the speaker forgetting the former
part of the sentence knoweth not what the latter should be. Also a needlesse
interposition is like unprofitable houshold stuffe that filleth roome but doth no
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service: or like to the Missletoe, which albeit it standeth in the tree, and liveth by
his juice, yet is neither of the like nature, nor beareth the like frute. (199)
Peacham agrees with Puttenham that overly long parentheses can create confusion. Going
beyond Puttenham, however, he stresses that long digressions make readers forget where
they are in a sentence. When the end of the parenthesis is delayed too long, reader and
writer alike lose track of what is happening in the main sentence. Both the eloquence and
the ugliness of parenthesis derive from its extraneousness—its “needlesse” quality. But
Peacham goes a step further to consider why that is the case. In comparing the words
contained in a parenthesis to “houshold stuffe” that serves no purpose, he suggests that
lengthy parentheses have no value. Indeed, the subsequent mistletoe simile vividly
confirms the way parenthetical discourse counts as an entirely different kind of language.
For Peacham, parenthesis is a parasitic discourse, different entirely from the normative
discourse of which it is a privation, and as a result it can bring either “light” or
“obscurity.”
Puttenham’s and Peacham’s definitions of the parenthesis and of its virtues and
vices are consistent with early modern writing practices. In particular, the use of
parentheses in the period demonstrates Peacham’s insight that the figure’s chief value
(which is also potentially a lack of value) goes hand-in-hand with its extraneousness
because parenthetical text functions as a distinct part of the discourse in which it appears,
even when lunulae marks are not used. By the end of the sixteenth century, parentheses
had developed conventional uses in verse and prose alike. These uses no doubt arose
from and informed the rhetoric manuals’ definitions, and as a result the parenthesis
185
proved versatile in practice, capable of filling all kinds of representational needs. Table 1
below lists the various “parcell[s] of speach” that regularly occupy parentheses in
Renaissance texts:
Type of parenthesis
Vocatives
Attributions of
speech
Sententiae
Short interjections or
interruptions
Grammatical
signposts, often
relative or
subordinate clauses
Supplementary
information
Qualifications and
commentary
Similes and other
comparisons
Example16
“If it be so, then (O you Stars) judge rightly of me …” (118v)
“O me vnfortunate wretch (said she) what poysonous heates be these …”
(118v)
“had his mariage in short time blest (for so are folke woont to say, how
vnhappie soeuer the children after grow) with a sonne …” (128v)
“her body (O sweet body) couered with a light Taffeta garment …” (61)
“they hearing him speake in Greek (which was their naturall language)
became …” (3v)
“so it may be our conceits (not able to beare her sun-stayning excellencie)
will better way it …” (3)
“he gaue a great groane, (a dolefull note but a pleasaunt dittie) for …”
(3v)
“do now (like a diligent workman) make ready the chiefe instrument …”
(54)
Table 2: Taxonomy of Parentheses in Renaissance English Literature
Obviously these uses overlap one another. The illustration of a grammatical signpost, for
example, also provides supplementary information. The whole assortment exhibits such a
wide range of stylistic possibilities and was so prevalent in late Elizabethan English
literature that we might rightly tally parenthesis among its principal textual and rhetorical
components.17 Moreover, because of its distinctive punctuation, the figure is also the
most visible.
16 For the sake of simplicity, all examples in this list come from Philip Sidney’s Arcadia
(London: J. Windet, 1590). Page references appear in the text.
17 See Lennard, But I Digress, 10-51.
186
The types of parentheses in the table above share several characteristics, which
Puttenham and Peacham recognize and perhaps find troubling. These qualities make
parenthesis a figure of and instrument for apposition, understood in the literal sense of
placing one thing (in this case, a mode of discourse) next to another.18 The parenthesis
signals and creates a shift from public, normative discourse to more private, direct one.
The instance above under “grammatical signpost” provides a good example: “they
hearing him speake in Greek (which was their naturall language) became ….” This
parenthesis effects a change of the mode in which the narrator speaks. The
nonparenthetical narrative mode does not allow an explanation, for the reader’s sake, of
why the characters speak Greek, since to do so would strain the representational
framework to the breaking point. The narrator breaks from the tale to provide information
to the reader, commenting on the narrative action from a parenthetical discourse that is
both outside and inside that action. As in modern parenthesis use, this discursive shift
often involves a shift in tone. When read aloud, a parenthesis demands that a speaker
lower his or her voice and speak more intimately, moving from normal speech to a more
sincere, honest, direct, and private kind. The contrast between these two layers of
discourse, visible on the page and audible in spoken language, creates a situation in
which the mistletoe-like parenthesis operates not against but alongside the tree-like
normative language. Consequently, as Puttenham and Peacham make manifest, the
parenthesis is valuable (eloquent, useful, helpful to communication) for the same reason
it is valueless (ugly, confusing): it exists as an extractable and distinct apposite.
18 OED, s.v. “apposition2.”
187
The parenthesis as it appears in the rhetoric manuals speaks for the literary culture
of early modern England as a whole, in which much of what was valuable was also
extractable, and even unnecessary. This quality appears in literary commonplacing, the
practice of marking, copying, and collecting sections of poetic, moral, or otherwise
worthwhile language.19 As the table above shows, parentheses often contained sententiae,
marking the words between the brackets as available for removal. Printed books used
several other methods for marking potential commonplaces or “flowers,” including italic
font or a marginal nota character.20 Commonplacing thus equates valuable language with
extractability. If a line or set of lines is worth removing and including in a florilegium or
book of flowers, then it is marked as removable. Writing about the first Quarto of
Hamlet, Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass argue that “rather than demonstrating the
depth of any character, lines marked as sententiae are deliberately designed to be
extracted from the dramatic situation and from the character who speaks them.”21 Even
though, as we will see, Hamlet’s parenthetical qualities allow for both “depth of
character” and extractability, Lesser’s and Stallybrass’s point elucidates the way literary
value is derived from material that is unnecessary and thus exchangeable. This is the
lesson of Erasmus’s De Copia, one of the foundational texts of Renaissance literary
culture: how we say or write something has as much value as, and probably more value
19 See Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century
England (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993).
20 G. K. Hunter, “The Marking of Sententiae in Elizabethan Printed Plays, Poems, and
Romances,” The Library 6 (1951): 171-88.
21 Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass, “The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of
Professional Plays,” Shakespeare Quarterly 59, no. 4 (2008): 415.
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than, what we say or write. The beautiful but not strictly necessary fullness of language,
perhaps best exemplified in the “golden” writings of the 1590s, at once breaks and fulfills
Aristotle’s dictum about poetic wholeness:
The truth is that … in poetry the story, as an imitation of action, must represent
one action, a complete whole, with its several incidents so closely connected that
the transposition or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoin and dislocate the
whole. For that which makes no perceptible difference by its presence or absence
is no real part of the whole.22
Like the parenthesis, most early modern imaginative writing would aim to “represent one
action, a complete whole,” but the commonplace—and, indeed, the whole economy of
literary exchange—works on the assumption that what is “transpos[ed] or withdraw[n]”
comprises the basic currency of the representational marketplace.
Hamlet’s Parentheses
On the basis of his statement about poetic wholeness, Aristotle probably would
not like the parenthesis. The main characteristic of the figure, particularly as Peacham
and Puttenham describe it, is that removing it does not, in Aristotle’s words, “disjoin and
dislocate the whole.” The parenthesis “makes no perceptible difference by its presence or
absence,” yet it seems to represent the essence of eloquence and beauty. For the very
same reasons, Aristotle probably would not like Hamlet either. The fact that nearly every
22 The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, trans.
I. Bywater, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984), 1451a 30-36.
189
modern production of Shakespeare’s play makes significant cuts in the second Quarto
text flies in the face of the philosopher’s insistence that every part must be “closely
connected” to the others. Transposing or withdrawing parts of the play proves
embarrassingly easy: Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” soliloquy appears in different places
in the first and second Quartos, and his “How all occasions do inform against me” speech
is omitted in many performances. Both the play and the rhetorical figure share the
resistance to unity that Aristotle despises, yet they still ultimately “represent one action, a
complete whole,” if only by virtue of the fact they both have a starting and ending point.
This likeness between Hamlet and the parenthesis goes to the heart of the play, and to
Shakespeare’s writing practice. In that similarity we witness Shakespeare having his
aesthetic cake and eating it too, for Hamlet at once keeps and breaks Aristotle’s rule by
means of its many parenthetical features. If Maurice Charney was right to claim that
“even with good will, one cannot find a meaningful expression of delay embodied either
in the imagery or in any other recognizable imaginative form” in the play, then the
opposite is also true, and the play’s action is represented specifically within a structure of
delay—the parenthesis.23 Shakespeare puts the appositional quality of the parenthesis
(and ultimately of Renaissance eloquence) at the heart of his play.
Like the figure, much of the play’s middle is “unnecessary” and could be taken
away (Puttenham’s “may be thence”) without “detriment” to the main points of the plot.
It is perhaps the most common line in literary criticism that the last four acts of Hamlet
feature one deferral or interposition after another, as Hamlet avoids or is prevented from
23 Maurice Charney, Style in Hamlet (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1969), 314.
190
killing his uncle. Without these interruptions, these “insertions,” the “principall matter”
of Hamlet’s revenge would presumably carry on apace.24 As Bradley’s seminal remarks
assert, were we to remove Acts Two, Three, and Four, the revenge plot would remain
more or less whole, if not organically then generically. Early modern revenge tragedies
feature a significant amount of delay and deferral of the promised bloodbath. Indeed,
delay became a hallmark of the genre as it grew in popularity.25 As Roland Frye notes,
however, the suspense in plays such as The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Spanish Tragedy,
Antonio’s Revenge, and The Atheist’s Tragedy concerns “the fascinating horrors [the
revenger] would devise in return for the horrors which had been inflicted on him.” In
Hamlet, Shakespeare gives us three kinds of suspense: the suspense of the revenge plot,
the suspense “of variations upon that form so that the audience was kept wondering
whether the Prince would ever achieve revenge at all, and … the suspense of probing the
ultimate mysteries of human nature and destiny.”26 The play’s middle, an interposed
deferral of promised revenge, “makes a great gappe in the tale.” William Empson
describes how Shakespeare decided that “the only way to shut this hole is to make it
big.”27
24 On Hamlet as the anti-action hero, see Eric S. Mallin, “‘You Kilt My Foddah’; or Arnold,
Prince of Denmark,” Shakespeare Quarterly 50, no. 2 (1999): 127-51.
25 See Fredson Thayer Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 1587-1642 (Gloucester, MA: Peter
Smith, 1959) and Charles A. Hallett and Elaine S. Hallett, The Revenger’s Madness: A Study of Revenge
Tragedy Motifs (Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 1980).
26 Roland Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600 (Princeton: Princeton
UP, 1984), 168. On action, see also Richard Halpern, “Eclipse of Action: Hamlet and the Political
Economy of Playing,” Shakespeare Quarterly 59, no. 4 (2008): 450-82.
27 William Empson, Essays on Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), 84.
191
The play’s movement is (again quoting Puttenham) “so much interrupted” by
events, characters, roosters, and various structures of deferral that these “thick” and
“long” insertions threaten to “breede great confusion” in the tale. The first scene begins
with Barnardo’s interruption of Francisco’s watch and then Horatio’s and Marcellus’s
interruption of the conversation between friends. Moments later, the Ghost interposes
itself into the scene:
Barnardo
… Marcellus and myself,
The bell then beating one—
Enter GHOST
Marcellus
Peace, break thee off. Look where it comes again.
Barnardo
In the same figure like the King that’s dead. (1.1.37-40)
The Ghost causes “great confusion” among the men, inserting himself here and later in
the scene. Just as a parenthesis “break[s] … off” the movement of a sentence, so too the
Ghost breaks off their discourse. During this scene, and again when the Ghost talks to
Hamlet in 1.5, the rooster and the approaching dawn it signifies force the Ghost to exit
prematurely. Interruptions of this sort fill the play, confirming Michael Goldman’s sense
that we the audience are “regularly invited to complete an action … only to have our
response blocked, distracted, diverted, compromised in some way.”28 In 1.3 Polonius
enters and prolongs Laertes’ departure; in 2.2 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern interrupt
Hamlet, and the players interrupt them; Ophelia interrupts Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be”
28 Michael Goldman, “Hamlet and Our Problems,” in Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s Hamlet,
ed. David Scott Kastan (New York: G. K. Hall, 1995), 49.
192
soliloquy; Hamlet interrupts the action of “The Mousetrap”; the Ghost interrupts the
prince and Queen; in 4.5 Ophelia twice interrupts the royal court, and Laertes invades
with his followers; Hamlet’s message to Claudius causes confusion in 4.7; Hamlet
interrupts Ophelia’s funeral, perhaps even leaping into her grave; in the final scene,
Gertrude comes between Hamlet and the poisoned cup. Each interruption, including
others not listed here, begins like the opening of a parenthesis, bringing events not quite
consonant but still relevant to what was happening before. And sooner or later, each
interruption ends, if only through death.
Parenthesis itself is a pervasive figure of speech for most of Hamlet’s characters.
Indeed, the figure is “so common” in the play that many editors introduce parenthesis
marks and dashes to set off parenthetical “parcell[s] of speach.”29 Speaking to the Ghost,
Horatio cries, “Or if thou has uphoarded in thy life / Extorted treasure in the womb of
earth – / For which they say your spirits often walk in death – Speak of it” (1.1.135-38).
Later, the Ghost tells Hamlet about “Murder most foul – as in the best it is – / But this
most foul, strange and unnatural,” and Hamlet, reeling from his encounter with the Ghost,
sends Horatio away, “You as your business and desire shall point you / (For every man
hath business and desire / Such as it is) and for my own poor part / I will go pray”
(1.5.27-28, 128-31). After Polonius’s death, Claudius says to Hamlet, “Hamlet, this deed
for thine especial safety – / Which we do tender, as we dearly grieve / For what which
thou hast done – must send thee hence” (4.3.39-41). Laertes bemoans that his father’s
29 Parenthesis even rivals hendiadys as the play’s central figure of speech. See George T. Wright,
“Hendiadys and Hamlet,” PMLA 96, no. 2 (March 1981): 168-93.
193
means of death, his obscure funeral –
No trophy, sword nor hatchment o’er his bones,
No noble rite, nor formal ostentation –
Cry to be heard as ’twere from heaven to earth
That I must call’t in question. (4.5.205-9)
Each of these parentheses, in Peacham’s words, “setteth a sentence a sonder” in order to
“comfirme the saying by the interposition of a reason.”30 They provide extra, albeit
strictly unnecessary, information, a point that must not go understated: these parentheses,
along with many others in the play, may be extracted with ease, either to be quoted as a
“flower” of eloquence or, by their omission, to speed up the plot. Editors, registering this
quality of the play’s language, have regularly introduced dashes and lunulae where the
early texts contain few.
At least one Insertour appears in the play in the character of Polonius, who
continually interrupts himself and interposes unnecessary “parcell[s] of speech.” Indeed,
parenthetical digression more than any other quality individuates this chief courtier, as
Claudius and others recognize. When speaking to the King and Queen about Hamlet, for
example, he interrupts with a parenthesis and then interrupts his interruption:
But what might you think,
When I had seen this hot love on the wing –
As I perceived it (I must tell you that)
30 Other examples include 1.2.21; 1.5.44-45, 60; 2.1.96; 2.2.5-7; 3.4.201; 4.7.56; 4.7.156;
5.1.155-57; 5.2.20-21, 24, 33-36, 50.
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Before my daughter told me – what might you,
Or my dear majesty your Queen here, think
If I had played the desk or table-book,
Or given my heart a working mute and dumb,
Or looked upon this love with idle sight,
What might you think?
(2.2.128-36)
Here we see the Insertour on stage. What is perhaps most remarkable about his nested
parenthesis is that it is utterly normal for Polonius. Nearly every one of his speeches
contains some kind of interposition or digression. This characteristic, Polonius’s inability
to “refuse to yield examples even in the plainest cases,” recalls Puttenham’s similar
inability to help himself from giving examples. What is more, Polonius’s parenthetical
habits exemplify Peacham’s “unprofitable household stuffe that filleth roome but doth no
service.” He stands as an exaggerated embodiment of the parenthesis’ potential for
ugliness and annoyance. Ultimately, and fatally, Polonius acts as an interposition, coming
between Hamlet and Claudius. The prince even calls him an “intruding fool” (3.4.31).31
In addition to parentheses at the level of plot, scene, speech, and character,
Shakespeare’s continual emphasis on things and people “cast betweene” betrays a habit
of thought based on interposition. Polonius demands that Ophelia reveal “what is
between” herself and Hamlet (1.3.97), just as Hamlet refers to his discussion with the
Ghost as “what is between us” (1.5.138). When Polonius asks the prince “what is the
31 Gideon Burton’s well-known website on rhetoric, “Silva Rhetoricae: The Forest of Rhetoric”
(http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/silva.htm), cites the speeches of Polonius as an example of the
parenthesis.
195
matter” of which he reads, Hamlet responds “Between who?” deliberately wrenching
Polonius’s words to refer to a relational kind of “matter” (2.2.190-91). A few lines later
in the Folio text, Polonius promises to “contrive the means of meeting between him and
my daughter,” interposing himself into the pair’s intimacy (2.2.210-11). Before “The
Mousetrap,” Hamlet says bawdily to Ophelia, “that’s a fair thought to lie between maid’s
legs,” while the Player Queen expresses to the Player King her wish that “never come
mischance between us twain.” Claudius’s favorable relationship with the King of
England, the “love between them” that “like the palm might flourish,” permits Claudius
to entrust him with the murder of Hamlet—that is, until Hamlet foils those plans,
interposing a different request (5.2.40). The Ghost tells Hamlet to “come between”
Gertrude “and her fighting soul” for the Queen’s own good (3.4.109), and Hamlet later
complains that Claudius “popp’d in between th’election and my hopes” (5.2.64). These
and other structures of betweenness would seem to support de Grazia’s claim that the
play’s “extremes are set, and in the middle—the meantime—is all that remains, [taking]
the form not of a telic advance from start to finish, but rather of a filling up between those
two endpoints.”32 Yet the opposition between “telic advance” and “filling up between” is
not so strong as de Grazia implies. Shakespeare refuses to choose between one and the
other, opting instead for both an advance from start to finish (the play does end, however
long it may be) and an intervening pause between beginning and end. Everything
“between” works not so much against the play’s advance as beside it.
32 De Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet, 197.
196
In the Introduction to their Arden 3 edition, Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor
complain that one “problematic legacy” of the play’s long critical history is “the sheer
(over-)familiarity of the play’s language.” Hamlet, they write, “can seem a mere tissue of
quotations” (25). Indeed, our familiarity with the play can make even its most powerful
moments seem stale. But does this “tissue of quotations” necessarily derive from our
familiarity with the play? Hamlet’s manifest parenthetical qualities show us that
extractability is at its heart. As Lesser and Stallybrass point out, sections from the
supposedly theatrical first Quarto are marked as removable commonplaces. We have seen
how characters persistently introduce parentheses into their speech, dilating discourse
well beyond necessity.33 Polonius offers sententiae to Laertes and Ophelia specifically so
that they will extract them and thus literally take his advice. And as we will see, the
soliloquies too “may be thence” with very little detriment to the play. At nearly every
level—words, sentences, speeches, and even whole scenes—we are permitted and even
invited to extract parts of the play. We reuse them for our own purposes, or we simply
omit them. Either way, the play’s mysteries are meant to be plucked out: it is
Shakespeare’s most quoted play in part because he wrote it specifically to be quotable.
The play is asking us to exchange with it—asking us, that is, to take it as a literary text.
Hamlet’s parentheses even shed light on some of its vexed textual problems.
Indeed, the latter can be read as a function of the former, in the sense that parenthetical
habits of thought provide the enabling literary conditions for the play’s textual situation.
33 On dilatory discourse, see Patricia Parker, “Othello and Hamlet: Dilation, Spying, and the
‘Secret Place’ of Woman,” Representations 44 (1993): 60-95.
197
Lesser and Stallybrass adduce the first Quarto’s commonplace markers to argue that the
book, usually regarded as a corrupt theatrical text, advertises itself as a literary text. They
claim that Q1 Hamlet “was offered to readers at the moment of its production as an early
example of the professional theater’s capacity to produce literature.”34 As a result, they
disagree with Erne’s understanding of literature as something originating in the author,
arguing instead that the literary “emerged primarily through the activity of readers” at
whom commonplace markers are directed.35 But the play’s parenthetical nature suggests
a middle ground between these two positions. In a play built upon extractability, the
writer and reader (and printer and audience member) are constantly engaging in a literary
exchange much more visible than in other plays. The first Quarto is not literary simply
because it contains commonplace markers. It is literary because it works within an
economy in which those markers become meaningful—and indeed, valuable.
It is therefore hardly surprising that Shakespeare’s parenthesis play—the one in
which so much is movable, removable, even convertible—also presents the greatest
textual puzzle. The play’s parentheses produce extraction and repurposing of just the sort
present in the complex, mysterious relationships between Q1, Q2, and F. The most
notorious example is the first Quarto’s transposition of the “To be or not to be” soliloquy
to a point earlier than it appears in Q2 and F. In this supposedly corrupt version of the
famous speech, we see at least one person making literary exchanges:
To be, or not to be – ay, there’s the point.
34 Lesser and Stallybrass, “The First Literary Hamlet,” 410-11.
35 Ibid., 414.
198
To die, to sleep – is that all? Ay, all.
No, to sleep, to dream – ay, marry, there it goes,
For in that dream of death, when we’re awaked
And borne before an everlasting judge
From whence no passenger ever returned –
The undiscovered country, at whose sight
The happy smile and the accursed damned. (7.115-22)
Whether the source of Q1 knew the “To be or not to be” speech from Q2 or in some other
version, this version evinces the give-and-take at the heart of literary activity. Some
phrases and syntactic units remain the same, but others are changed altogether.36 The
play’s “tissue of quotations”—its parentheses of every kind—permits, even endorses,
misquotation, and thus whatever the reasons behind the three texts’ variations, they occur
within the conditions of exchange represented by the parenthesis.
In a well-known essay, Stephen Booth discusses the way Hamlet “makes an
impossible coherence of truths that are both undeniably incompatible and undeniably
coexistent.”37 Booth’s observation applies perfectly to the play’s parenthetical basis.
Shakespeare structures Hamlet on this peculiar rhetorical figure and its appositional
qualities, and in doing so creates a play whose dramatic force derives from apparent
opposites working side-by-side. This appositional quality goes as deep as the apparent
36 For a detailed comparison of the versions, see Douglas Bruster, To Be or Not to Be (London:
Continuum, 2007), 87-98.
37 Stephen Booth, “On the Value of Hamlet,” in Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, ed.
David Scott Kastan (New York: G.K. Hall, 1995), 39.
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tension, longstanding in the critical conversation, between delay and unity. The two are
not enemies, as the critical tradition has left us prone to think, but rather neighbors. Booth
would go on to argue that the play’s strength is that it “allows us to comprehend—hold
onto—all the contradictions it contains.” The source of that strength, he claims,
is in a rhetorical economy that allows the audience to perform both of the basic
actions of the mind upon almost every conjunction of elements in the course of
the play: it perceives strong likeness, and it perceives strong difference. Every
intellectual conjunction is also a disjunction, and any two things that pull apart
contain qualities that are simultaneously the means of uniting them.38
Even though Booth uses “economy” casually, he hits upon the key term energizing the
play’s literary intervention. The very same economy of exchange that operates so
pervasively in Hamlet also, as we have seen, sustains the early modern literary
marketplace. Economies of language and structure in Shakespeare’s play correspond to
evaluative economies of writing and reading in Shakespeare’s culture.
Hamlet’s Parentheses
As Bradley’s notorious reading illustrates, the play’s title character has long been
seen as the center and source of the play’s value as an aesthetic object. The possibility of
the play without the prince seems absurd, and yet Prince Hamlet behaves just like a
parenthesis, more subtly and extensively even than the Insertour Polonius. His
38 Ibid., 42.
200
conversation with Horatio and Marcellus and his subsequent dialogue with the Ghost of
Hamlet Sr. show his parenthetical habit of thought and suggest that the condition may be
hereditary. He rambles:
So oft it chances in particular men
That, for some vicious mole of nature in them,
As in their birth wherein they are not guilty
(Since nature cannot choose his origin),
By their o’ergrowth of some complexion
Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason,
Or by some habit that too much o’erleavens
The form of plausive manners – that these men,
Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect
(Being Nature’s livery or Fortune’s star),
His virtues else, be they as pure as grace,
As infinite as man may undergo,
Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault: the dram of eale
Doth all the noble substance of a doubt
To his own scandal
Enter GHOST (1.4.23-38)
There are so many parenthetical digressions here that Horatio almost seems relieved to
say “Look, my lord, it comes” (38). About this lengthy speech, Peacham might point out
201
that Hamlet’s interposed lines “cause obscuritie of the sense” and “confusion of former
and matter.” Although the main verb occurs in the first line (“chances”) the subsequent
“that” clause gets lost even for Hamlet, who has to restart his sentence (“that these men”).
The Arden editors could well have added more sets of lunulae than the two they did,
except that the prince himself seems to lose track of where he is in the nested
parentheses. Hamlet’s syntactic habits bear remarkable similarities to the Ghost’s, who
digresses in much the same way.39
Hamlet’s main parentheses are his soliloquies. Easily the most quotable and
quoted parts of Hamlet, they have been valued for at least the last two-hundred years as a
supposed dramatization of deep, historically innovative interiority.40 Before Hamlet’s
soliloquies became a “dramatized cogito,” however, Shakespeare used them to yoke
Erasmian, humanist definitions of eloquence and beauty together with neo-classical
definitions that were beginning to appear in 1600. Even in the soliloquies, Hamlet does
not have to choose between copious delay and Aristotelian unity; rather, delay and unity
belong to the same parenthetical system of literary evaluation. Although he is not the
only character to soliloquize, he does so habitually, and his doing so is reminiscent of the
39 For example, the ghost comments parenthetically on what he says:
Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast,
With witchcraft of his wits, with traitorous gifts –
O wicked wit and gifts that have the power
So to seduce – won to his shameful lust
The will of my most seeming-virtuous Queen. (1.5.42-46)
Even though he knows the morning is coming and despite his promise to be “brief” (59), the
Ghost inserts several parentheses into his speech, such as “My custom always of the afternoon” (60).
40 Margreta De Grazia, “Soliloquies and Wages in the Age of Emergent Consciousness,” Textual
Practice 9, no. 1 (1995): 80-81.
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way parentheses create a switch to a more private form of discourse.41 Hamlet’s
dramatized parentheses function as appositive speeches that occur both inside, outside,
and alongside the business of the play. In soliloquy, Hamlet can comment upon the
events in which he is embroiled, but he can also take refuge from them. Moreover, as
Thompson and Taylor put it, “while Hamlet’s soliloquies are among the best-known and
indeed best-loved features of the play, they seem … to be movable or even detachable”
(18). Like the parenthesis, these speeches by their very structure ask to be extracted and
recycled—deleted—and that potential is the very source of their value. De Grazia
confirms this connection with the parenthesis by having recourse to the commonplace:
It is because [soliloquy] is semantically and formally self-contained that it is, like
an inset, transferrable …. Autonomous and detachable, it has all the makings of
what it soon becomes: an anthology piece which, like a proverb, is fit for
reproducing and recontextualizing, lifting and resituating.”42
When literariness is understood as a mode of verbal exchange, then the soliloquies do not
have to wait until 1800 to become examples of Shakespeare’s writings at their most
literary. They were literary when Shakespeare wrote them to be exchanged—or in De
Grazia’s terms, transferred.
41 James Hirsh argues that in Shakespeare’s time, soliloquies represented the speech of dramatic
characters but not their thoughts. “Before the middle of the seventeenth century,” he claims, “there were
only two kinds of soliloquies, audience address and self-address, both of which represented speeches by
characters.” See Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson UP,
2003), 18-20. De Grazia, citing Raymond Williams, implicitly disagrees with Hirsh’s bifurcation of
“public” and “private”: “there could be no such thing as a character talking to himself on the Shakespearean
stage for the simple reason that it was physically impossible to produce the illusion that a character was
alone.” See “Soliloquies,” 75.
42 De Grazia, “Soliloquies,” 76.
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The first soliloquy (“O that this too too sallied flesh …”) confirms the
detachability to which these critics point, and it evinces Hamlet’s parenthetical mindset.
Were the speech removed, the scene would lose little of its dramatic poignancy. If
anything, doing so may even heighten the contrast between the new king Claudius and
the former king Hamlet Sr. as Horatio, Marcellus, and Barnardo describe him. The scene
would move from a decidedly public one at court to one involving more intimate
conversation:
Claudius:
Come away.
Flourish. Exeunt all but Hamlet.
Enter HORATIO, MARCELLUS, and BARNARDO.
Horatio:
Hail to your lordship.
Hamlet :
I am glad to see you well –
Horatio, or I do forget myself. (1.2.128, 160-61)
Removing Hamlet’s soliloquy certainly speeds up the scene, and the new version
smoothes out the entrances and exits. If we did not know the speech was there, we would
never have missed it. Scholarly essays would have discussed how Horatio might be
talking to either Claudius or Hamlet, thus complicating the play’s political meanings.
What, then, does Hamlet’s soliloquy mean if considered as an interposition in the scene?
The first few lines read:
O that this too too sallied flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew,
204
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon ’gainst self-slaughter. O God, God,
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world! (129-34)
In just these six lines, Hamlet draws on two conventional uses of parenthesis,
commentary and a vocative (see Table 1). He goes on to insert several parentheses inside
his larger one, which many editors mark as such: “—nay, not so much, not two—” (138);
“(Let me not think on’t—Frailty, thy name is Woman)” (146); “—O God, a beast that
wants discourse of reason / Would have mourned longer—” (150-51); “(but no more like
my father / Than I to Hercules)” (152-53). Within earshot of only the audience, Hamlet
comments upon his situation and cries out to God. The speech is bound on one side by
the exit of everyone but Hamlet and on the other by the entrance of others. Like the
lunulae marks, which signal and create a shift from normative, public discourse to private
language, these exits and entrances contain Hamlet’s secretly open parenthetical
commentary.43 Because of this appositional structure, the answer to the question “Is this a
representation of Hamlet’s internal self?” can be both yes and no.
Many scholars do not count Hamlet’s long response to the Ghost (“O all you host
of heaven” [1.5.92]) as a soliloquy, but it sufficiently fits the criteria, perhaps even better
than “To be, or not to be” does. The Ghost exits, and before Horatio and Marcellus
reenter, Hamlet delivers a speech commenting on what he has just heard. More
43 On “secretly open” playing, see Robert Weimann and Douglas Bruster, Shakespeare and the
Power of Performance: Stage and Page in the Elizabethan Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008),
139-59.
205
importantly, the speech explicitly connects Hamlet’s habits of speech with the value
dynamic implicit in the parenthesis. Perhaps looking at the trapdoor through which his
father’s spirit has just exited, Hamlet promises:
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain
Unmixed with baser matter. (98-104)
He says he will extract his father’s command and copy it into the commonplace book of
his mind, extracting all that he held there. What he once considered important enough to
remember—perhaps something he learned in Wittenberg, or perhaps some poetic flowers
he copied to give to Ophelia—he now sees as trivial, foolish, and base. They have
become useless and even ugly, and thus their extraction is requisite. Hamlet exchanges
one verbal artifact for another in order to make revenge his primary ethic. Even in the
midst of his speech, however, he confuses which sententia he is supposed to be copying:
“My tables! Meet it is I set it down / That one may smile and smile and be a villain”
(107-8). Despite common confusion on this point, this line about villains is not the one he
promises his father he will remember. Only at the end of his speech—at the end of this
parenthetical digression—does he repeat the correct command: “Adieu, adieu, remember
me” (111). Hamlet thinks he is promising his father he will not delay, but he makes that
206
promise within a form (the staged parenthesis) specifically designed for delay. Here
Shakespeare represents the confrontation of the problem with unnecessary, decorous
discourse that Peacham confronts in his description of the parenthesis: “the speaker
forgetting the former part of the sentence knoweth not what the latter should be.” This
failure to remember is, of course, why the Ghost revisits Hamlet later in the play.
Hamlet’s statement that he wants not just to kill but to damn Claudius has left
many readers unsettled. Samuel Johnson found the claim “too horrible to be read or
uttered” because of what it suggests about Hamlet’s ethical state (3.3.73-95n). Instead of
merely revealing Hamlet’s internal self, however, Shakespeare once again creates a
structure of deferral that is also unified, highlighting the appositional quality of the
soliloquy-parenthesis by nesting one such deferral inside another. This does not mean we
should not find the scene disturbing. The scene’s parenthetical form produces our
shuddering response and makes it only more terrible. Polonius exits to hide behind the
fatal arras, and Claudius begins a soliloquy:
O, my offence is rank: it smells to heaven;
It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t –
A brother’s murder. Pray can I not:
Though inclination be as sharp as will,
My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent
And like a man to double business bound
I stand in pause where I shall first begin
And both neglect. (3.3.36-43)
207
Though the content of Claudius’s frustration may differ from Hamlet’s, the form of that
frustration is similar. The king, like the prince, finds himself bidden by two impulses,
guilt and intent, and in soliloquy he “stand[s] in pause” to describe the situation and to
complain about it. Claudius wants his parenthesis to be a vocative—he wants to address
God in prayer—but his guilt forces him to talk to himself instead. Pulled into the
privatized speech of the parenthesis, he fantasizes about heaven, where “the action lies /
In his true nature” and all secrets are revealed (61-62). Then, continuing in soliloquy, he
bows his “stubborn knees” in an attempt to repent.
At this point, still in the midst of Claudius’s parenthesis, Hamlet enters and
delivers a soliloquy-parenthesis of his own, the hair-raising promise to send his uncle to
hell. Claudius’s and Hamlet’s speeches are next to each other, but the latter is also inside
the former and also, in a different sense, outside it:
Now might I do it. But now ’a is a-praying,
And now I’ll do it [Draws sword.] – and so ’a goes to heaven,
And so am I revenged! That would be scanned:
A villain kills my father, and for that
I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To heaven. (73-78)
Once more thinking like the parenthesis, he attempts to examine (“scan”) the implications
of what he is about to do, in Peacham’s terms “interpos[ing] a reason” and doing his best
to “resolve the doubt.” In “confirming” his reasoning, of course, he changes his mind, but
having done so he still attempts to prevent objections by promising to commit the act on a
208
more fitting occasion. In this sense, the speech comments on Hamlet’s own situation, but
it is also a parenthetical comment upon Claudius’s parenthesis. The king has just finished
pondering how, in heaven, everything private is made public so that it may be judged.
There are no parentheses in heaven. But Hamlet does not want Claudius’s sins to be made
known, because that confession is the first step in repentance. Instead, Hamlet wants
Claudius’s private actions to provide the basis for accusation against him, and he
therefore chooses to keep the parenthesis intact, sheathing his sword and exiting to find
his mother. What matters here is what happens in between, in the unnecessary delay
between start and finish. But the middle’s value—its beauty—is contingent upon the
ending. If Hamlet killed Claudius, the parenthesis would not be completed and not
extractable, and thus not exchangeable for damnation. We, in turn, would not experience
the frisson of horror at Hamlet’s uncle-damning desires. Shakespeare wants us to
shudder, but we would not shudder if Hamlet did not delay.
About the play’s final soliloquy, which begins “How all occasions do inform
against me,” G. R. Hibbard wrote that it “do[es] nothing to advance the action, nor do[es]
[it] reveal anything new about Hamlet and his state of mind” (4.4.31).44 The play’s stage
and film history confirms Hibbard’s sense that the speech counts as the most extractable
of the soliloquies, because many productions omit it. Moreover, it is a critical
commonplace to note that rather than moving toward revenge in this moment, Hamlet is
moving away from it, and toward England. The phrase “But I digress” might
44 Quoted in Thompson and Taylor, Introduction, 19-20. But see also Alex Newell’s claim that
the speech is integral to the play, in The Soliloquies in Hamlet: The Structural Design (Rutherford, N.J:
Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1991), 131-45.
209
satisfactorily summarize the speech, for Shakespeare continues the play’s structure of
deferral to a point that it feels interminable, as if the digression will never and can never
end. No one seems more conscious of this feeling than Hamlet:
Now whether it be
Bestial oblivion or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on th’event
(A thought which quartered hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward) I do not know
Why yet I live to say this thing’s to do,
Sith I have cause and will and strength and means
To do’t. (38-45)
Even in admitting his inability to stop digressing, Hamlet pauses parenthetically to
specify what proportions of wisdom and cowardice his deferral contains. After berating
himself for not following the example of Fortinbras’s army, the prince promises that
“from this time forth, / My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth” (64-65). The “great
gappe in the tale” has grown so great that confusion, and perhaps boredom and irritation,
set in. Hamlet, along with the audience, recognizes how worthless his protracted
digressions are becoming. Once more, he promises to bring the digression to a tidy close,
but he does so within the digressive structure of the dramatized parenthesis. The
worthlessness of his delay derives from the very same quality of extractability that also
produced his delay’s value. In the same way, the apparent endlessness of that delay works
because the delay is, as parenthesis, self-contained and apposite to action.
210
Shakespeare’s most famous soliloquy is also a parenthesis, and it is famous
because it is one. The parenthetical quality of “To be, or not to be” makes the speech the
most durable and enduring dramatic text in English-speaking culture. It is a
commonplace of Hamlet criticism that the speech is totally unnecessary to the play, but
few if any critics have noted that this extractability advertizes the speech itself as a
commonplace. Richard Levin describes how “if we could find people who never heard of
this speech, and presented them with a version of the play that omitted it, they would
have no difficulty in following the action and would not be aware that something was
missing.”45 De Grazia describes this quality more extensively:
The speech is as little linked to the play Hamlet as to the character. As its textual
history bears out, it could drift from one position to another …. [The speech]
functions to break dramatic momentum, casting pale thought in the way of swift
action. As such it could be interchanged with any of the soliloquies – or slipped in
at any number of other places: after, for example, Hamlet returns from England or
contemplates Yorick's skull or enjoins Horatio to survive him. As it could appear
here or there, so too it could disappear altogether.46
Levin and De Grazia point to precisely the removability that makes the parenthesis
valuable, but they write as if the speech has value in spite of that quality and not because
of it. Like Hamlet, however, Shakespeare revels in such unnecessary fullness, and he uses
45 Richard Levin, “Hamlet’s Dramatic Soliloquies,” in Style: Essays on Renaissance and
Restoration Literature and Culture in Memory of Harriett Hawkins, ed. Allen Michie and Eric Buckley
(Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 2005), 116.
46 De Grazia, “Soliloquies,” 76.
211
it to bridge the gap between Erasmian copiousness and neo-classical insistence on unity.
Moreover, Levin and De Grazia stand in for most Hamlet critics, who assume that “To
be, or not to be” became famous accidentally, but the speech, by its parenthetical
structure and quotable style—phrases like “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” cry
out to be borrowed—calls attention to its own exchangeability and thus its potential
value. In this regard, the supposedly corrupt Q1 version bears witness that even in
production, “To be, or not to be” elicited exchanges. Even if he could not foresee the
heights of fame which the soliloquy would achieve, Shakespeare wrote it to become
known.
In slight contrast to the other soliloquies, “To be, or not to be” offers few of the
benefits of the parenthesis and many of its drawbacks. As a result, in the speech
Shakespeare pushes the contradiction between delay and unity to its extreme and then
situates them side-by-side. The speech appears, in Puttenham’s words, almost directly “in
the middest of your tale,” and it functions as “an unnecessary parcell of speech, which
neverthelesse may be thence without any detriment to the rest.” Yet it does not occur “for
larger information or some other purpose.” Its length makes it “utterly impertinent to the
principall matter,” and it “makes a great gappe in the tale.” The soliloquy contrasts
Peacham’s terms even more clearly: Hamlet is not “supposing that the hearer may
demaund a reason, or make an objection to that which he saith,” even if he knows
Polonius and Claudius are listening. He is not attempting “to confirme the saying”—that
is, whatever is outside the parenthesis—“by the interposition of a reason.” Even though
the play is “darke or doubtfull,” one is hard-pressed to claim that the speech “give[s]
212
light” and “resolve[s] the doubt.” Rather, for Hamlet, his eavesdroppers, and his
audience, the speech threatens to perplex us further. Peacham assumes that—now in
Hamlet’s words—at the end of a parenthesis the speaker will possess “the name of
action,” but Hamlet seems only to lose it. Finally, more than any other soliloquy in the
play, this one fulfills Peacham’s complaint that overlong parentheses become “like to the
Misstletoe, which albeit it standeth in the tree, and liveth by his juice, yet is neither of the
like nature, nor beareth the like fruit.” The speech acts as a parasite, totally impertinent,
useless, and alterior to the play. It contains the most pointless kind of deferral imaginable.
And at precisely the same time, it contains highly valuable and self-contained literary
commodities, the speech whose words and phrases have been appropriated for four
centuries.
Given this new perspective on Hamlet’s famous words, the critical history of the
soliloquy (and of the play generally) appears to be a textual effect of the apposite,
parenthetical form on which the play is based.47 Hamlet’s parentheses have produced
sharply opposite views about the play, yet those opposites exist side-by-side and draw
upon an equally convincing range of evidence from the play. Indeed, as de Grazia points
out, “Hamlet is continually reopened to yield a different problem which can in turn
account differently for varying textual details.”48 The play has been seen to hold true to
47 On the textual effect, see Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference: Essays in the
Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980).
48 De Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet, 170.
213
the values of humanism and to advance a new, counter-humanist program.49 It has been
seen as a medieval play and a thoroughly modern one, a wholeheartedly Catholic play
and an equally solid Protestant one. Hamlet’s deep interiority certainly does—and
certainly does not—exist. These and other sets of opposites arise from the apposition of
delay and unity that shapes and motivates the whole play. Shakespeare’s most copious,
digressive, and variant-filled work, most of which is unnecessary, is also his most selfcontained, aesthetically whole play, and this apposition infects any response to it.
But do Hamlet’s parentheses end? Is there a closing lunula mark? Many readers
think of Act Five as the moment in which the prince finally gets his act (not to mention
his action) together. Having leapt onto a pirate boat, sending Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern to an English death, Hamlet seems to be responding to his self-generated
pep talk to think bloody thoughts. Surely the man whose first line was the parenthetical
aside “A little more than kin, and less than kind” will end his digressions (1.2.65). When
the final scene begins, however, he is still digressing:
Up from my cabin,
My sea-gown scarfed about me, in the dark
Groped I to find out them, had my desire,
Fingered their packet, and in fine withdrew
To mine own room again, making so bold,
My fears forgetting manners, to unfold
49 See Neil Rhodes, “Hamlet and Humanism,” in Early Modern English Drama: A Critical
Companion, ed. Garrett A. Sullivan, Patrick Cheney, and Andrew Hadfield (New York: Oxford UP, 2006),
120-29.
214
Their grand commission; where I found, Horatio,
A royal knavery, an exact command
(Larded with many several sorts of reasons
Importing Denmark’s health, and England’s too)
With – ho! – such bugs and goblins in my life,
That on the supervise, no leisure bated
– No, not to stay the grinding of the axe! –
My head should be struck off (5.2.12-24)
This is exactly how he spoke before the Ghost entered in 1.4. He lines up four verbs to
follow “I”—groped, had, fingered, and withdrew. To these clauses, which are arranged to
achieve maximum suspension, he finds a way to append the rest of the sentence (“making
so bold” and “where I found”). He interposes several actual parentheses: “my fears
forgetting manners,” “Horatio,” “Larded … England’s too,” “ho!” and “No, not to stay
the grinding of the axe!” No, it is only in his antepenultimate speech that he lets the
parenthesis end:
You that look pale and tremble at this chance,
That are but mutes or audience to this act,
Had I but time (as this fell sergeant Death
Is strict in his arrest) – O, I could tell you –
But let it be. Horatio, I am dead. (318-22)
The Hamlet we know and have learned to love would ordinarily use the image of
Sergeant Death’s arrest as a chance to offer a decorous, digressive comment on the
215
situation. He almost gives in to the temptation, starting “O, I could tell you.” But he lets
the parenthesis fall, leaving others to do the talking.
216
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